OMG, sorry about 'poor comms' on Facebook secret emoto-meddle tests. Laters! A top Facebook chief has admitted the firm did a poor job of informing its users about a controversial 2012 experiment that manipulated the emotions of nearly 700,000 people on the free content ad network. COO Sheryl Sandberg told reporters during a meeting in India on Wednesday that Facebook had made a hash of the secret test …
at every opportunity. My DOB, place of birth, age, university and place of residence are all false.
If they're going to mine my data, I see it as my duty to pollute their database as much as possible.
Why yes, I am over 50. But you're welcome on my lawn -- as long as you bring refreshments.
I tried that when I was required to have an account to help various family members out with those wonderful games they have. Unfortunately I can no longer remember the ficticious DoB I used so I can't pass their security check as I have since replaced my laptop.
At least that's what I tell the kids when they pester me about logging in
I wonder how long before someone (or several someones) decide that because Facebooks emotional manipulation caused bad result X (do it poor work review, break up of a relationship, feeling bad about themself) it's time for a class action suit or similar, and Facebook get dragged into court. Totally bogus and pretty pointless but at the end of the day the problem is Facebook has got so big and brash that it doesn't think the rules apply to it any more...
...exemplary behaviour is expected from [FB]...
...just not the example we would prefer that others follow. I think the second definition, "serving as a warning," is more to the point.
"So for Facebook users who don't want to be guinea pigs, the rule of thumb is to provide as little information about themselves as possible. That means getting an account under an assumed name and supplying false information on location, age, education, marital status and any other matters that the user considers private. This violates Facebook's terms of use, but there's nothing the social network can do about it. In fact, so many people are already doing this -- that the actual value of all that research is uncertain."
This wasn't A/B testing by any measure of the term, once one reads the PNAS paper by Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (https://cornell.app.box.com/fbcontagion).
I hope El Reg and other journos now apply scrutiny to not only Facebook, but all of the other major social networks to find out what, exactly, their equivalents to the Facebook Data Science Group (which ran this experiment) are doing with their big data collections.
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