A recent ‘informed consent’ scandal

Thanks to Sarah Darley-Nolan for bringing this very interesting BBC radio 4 programme to my notice. I thought it would be good to share it here.

Informed consent
Facebook has been under fire for running a controversial ’emotion manipulation’ study on 689,003 Facebook users. The experiment, to find out whether emotions were contagious on the social network, involved minor changes to users’ news feeds. It’s contentious because the users were not informed that they were taking part in an experiment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048034h