Facebook recently sparked a lot of controversy after it was revealed that it performed an “emotion manipulation” study on January 2012 that consisted of altering the newsfeeds of 689,000 people in order to change their emotions. While it is not surprising that Facebook wants to better understand how its users react to certain information presented to them in their newsfeeds, it is extremely unethical that a firm as big and with as many users as Facebook abuses of its users’ privacy without their consent. In fact, it was discovered that Facebook added a short statement involving “research” to its user agreement about four months after performing this study. One of Facebook’s arguments is that its employees reviewed the studies that it was performing at the time. However, this most likely didn’t help because even if corporate executives know that their company’s actions are unethical, most don’t act according to their gut feeling of “social responsibility”. Instead, they often chose to ignore the issue because it is in their company’s best interest and because they can lose their jobs otherwise.

Facebook has to change the way it conducts its experiments if it wants to reassure its users that their data and privacy are safe and well respected. It should do this by being more transparent with its users in the company’s user agreement about the experiments it conducts in the future and the purpose that they will serve in improving the overall Facebook user experience.

Source of Article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-klitzman-md/why-facebook-needs-to-fol_b_5557862.html