{"id":29079,"date":"2014-07-02T08:18:20","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T08:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=29079"},"modified":"2014-07-02T08:18:20","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T08:18:20","slug":"facebook-faces-uk-probe-over-emotion-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=29079","title":{"rendered":"Facebook faces UK probe over emotion study"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"story_continues_1\">A UK regulator is investigating whether Facebook broke data protection laws when it conducted a psychological study on users without their consent.<\/p>\n<p>The test saw Facebook &#8220;manipulate&#8221; the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users to control which emotional expressions they were exposed to.<\/p>\n<p>The Information Commissioner&#8217;s Office (ICO) said it planned to question Facebook over the study.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook said it had taken &#8220;appropriate protections for people&#8217;s information&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are happy to answer any questions regulators may have,&#8221; Facebook&#8217;s Richard Allen said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/intl\/cms\/s\/0\/39b6b5aa-0146-11e4-9750-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz364jklHpb\">The Financial Times<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2014\/07\/01\/uk_and_irish_data_watchdogs_wade_in_on_facebook_messin_with_your_head_scandal\/\">The Register<\/a>\u00a0quoted the ICO as saying that it would contact Ireland&#8217;s data protection regulator over the issue.<\/p>\n<p>Facebook&#8217;s European headquarters are based in Dublin.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emotion test<\/strong><\/p>\n<p id=\"story_continues_2\">The research was conducted in collaboration with Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco on 689,000 Facebook users over a period of one week in 2012.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/111\/24\/8788.full\">According to the report on the study<\/a>: &#8220;The experiment manipulated the extent to which people were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The study found that users who had fewer negative stories in their news feed were less likely to write a negative post, and vice versa.<\/p>\n<p>The research was done to gauge if &#8220;exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>However, the research has been criticised because Facebook users were unaware they were taking part.<\/p>\n<p>Labour MP Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee, has called for an investigation into the matter.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8216;Improving our processes&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For its part, Facebook has defended the study and said that there was &#8220;no unnecessary collection of people&#8217;s data&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;None of the data used was associated with a specific person&#8217;s Facebook account,&#8221; the social networking giant said at the time.<\/p>\n<p>On Tuesday, Mr Allen said: &#8220;It&#8217;s clear that people were upset by this study and we take responsibility for it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We want to do better in the future and are improving our process based on this feedback.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, Adam Kramer of Facebook,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/akramer\/posts\/10152987150867796\">who co-authored the report on the research,<\/a>\u00a0has admitted the firm did not &#8220;clearly state our motivations in the paper&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused,&#8221; he said earlier this week.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A UK regulator is investigating whether Facebook broke data protection laws when it conducted a psychological study on users without their consent. The test saw Facebook &#8220;manipulate&#8221; the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users to control which emotional expressions they were exposed to. The Information Commissioner&#8217;s Office (ICO) said it planned to question Facebook over [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":29080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-29079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-dr-akwasi-osei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}