All About 1.3m August Novemberlapowskyprotocol

1.3m August Novemberlapowskyprotocol: If you’ve read anything about Facebook in the last few months, it would be hard to miss the mention of experiments that sought to manipulate users’ emotions. Though details were scarce, speculation ran rampant and people were outraged. Now, finally, we have some answers.

Internal documents from Facebook reveal that the company – which owes its share of privacy scandals – withheld certain protections from a subset of users to see how they would react without them.

The release of the documents is the consequence of a series of disclosures from Facebook regarding how it conducted experiments on unsuspecting users. The experiments were done to learn more about how users respond to changes in the News Feed, and whether their responses were different depending on their location, gender, or relationship status.

For example, Facebook has experimented with showing some users stories about people using Facebook in unusual places – such as friends who were abroad at the time – to see whether that would make them more likely to use it themselves.

The documents also show that Facebook tested different versions of the News Feed that included stories about different events, such as videos of fires and shark attacks.

A separate experiment sought to see whether telling users that their friends had seen the posts they had written decreased their engagement. The experiment tested two separate messages: one saying that 25 percent of the friends they were writing to had already seen the post, while a second said everyone saw it.

Facebook also conducted an experiment to determine if showing more posts from media companies would increase the time Facebook users spent on the News Feed by 10 minutes.

In each case, Facebook found that there was no change in user behavior.

The documents show that Facebook revealed some of these experiments in response to a series of inquiries from regulatory agencies and Congress about whether the company had violated people’s privacy by conducting experiments on them and altering their News Feed for commercial gain.

However, the documents show that Facebook never considered telling users about the experiments.

The New York Times  has released these documents in response to a subpoena from Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence. Warner said he wanted to know whether Facebook had violated terms of service or its own privacy policies.

Facebook said it was legally obligated not to reveal any information about user reactions data and that only the company had direct access to that data.

“We carefully consider what we disclose to third parties – and in some cases, we give them additional info about how we use their info,” Facebook wrote. “But because the information is tightly guarded, we can’t share all the details.”

Facebook also said it had never talked to any government agency about any of its data collection efforts. The company said it had only disclosed information in response to formal requests from federal agencies, including Congress.

Experts suggest that Facebook, like Google and other tech companies, does not consider the user an individual whose rights need to be protected. They treat the user as a product for sale, an asset which can be experimented on.

The experiments are particularly disturbing because they seem to have been conducted purely out of curiosity – one wonders what exactly they were trying to find out by withholding privacy protections – and at the expense of users’ security and well-being.