Facebook’s Secret Manipulation of User Emotions Faces European Inquiries; New York Times, 7/2/14

Facebook’s Secret Manipulation of User Emotions Faces European Inquiries:

"In response to widespread public anger, several European data protection agencies are examining whether Facebook broke local privacy laws when it conducted the weeklong investigation in January 2012.

That includes Ireland’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, which regulates Facebook’s global operations outside North America because the company has its international headquarters in Dublin. The Irish regulator has sent a series of questions to Facebook related to potential privacy issues, including whether the company got consent from users for the study, according to a spokeswoman.

The Information Commissioner’s Office of Britain also said that it was looking into potential privacy breaches that may have affected the country’s residents, though a spokesman of the office said that it was too early to know whether Facebook had broken the law. It is unknown where the users who were part of the experiment were located. Some 80 percent of Facebook’s 1.2 billion users are based outside North America...

The Federal Trade Commission, the American regulator that oversees Facebook’s conduct under a 20-year consent decree, has not publicly expressed similar interest in the case, which has caused an uproar over the company’s ethics and prompted the lead researcher on the project to apologize."