Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg apologized for the company’s controversial psychology experiment.
The experiment affected nearly 700,000 Facebook users by manipulating their feeds with positive and negative words. This angered users and researchers alike for its lack of transparency and inability for users to opt-out.
“This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you,” said Sandberg speaking in New Delhi.
Facebook finds itself under the magnifying glass yet again, this time because of its Data Science Team. The team performed experiments “with few boundaries,” according to a former member.
To make sure experiments carried out by Facebook are ethical, the company adopted stricter guidelines at the beginning of this year. Facebook says it submits experiments to a panel of 50 internal experts in the fields of privacy and data security. Unfortunately, the 2012 psychology experiment was performed before the stricter guidelines.
Facebook’s experiments are legal because users agree to the site’s terms of service. The terms explicitly state that users data can be used for “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
Facebook is currently under investigation for the two year-old experiment in the UK.
[Image credit: Reuters]
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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