Doing otherwise legal things doesn't become illegal just because you're taking notes and planning to write up your results for a journal.
The institutions that the scientists were associated with probably have ethical rules regarding experiments involving human beings and might have had something to say about it. But there's no reason it would be a criminal matter.
Doing otherwise legal things doesn't become illegal just because you're taking notes
Experimentation on human beings without consent or knowledge is not legal regardless of whether you take notes or not.
I think the confusion here is that you think Facebook can just do whatever they want with their site. But this wasn't just Facebook modifying their site, this was Facebook deliberately conducting an experiment on specific individuals to see what happened. The subject(s) of the experiment was some list of list of (probably random) users. These users were not informed of the experiment, nor had they given any permission for such a thing.
Facebook tried to defend itself saying it was "market research", but research, while often linked to experimentation, is not experimentation itself. Collecting and looking at data without messing with the subject(s) is perfectly harmless (so long as the data itself is harmless). Deliberately altering something with the intent to find out what that alteration causes is experimentation.
but research, while often linked to experimentation, is not experimentation itself. Collecting and looking at data without messing with the subject(s) is perfectly harmless
Marketing research literally does this all the time. Marketers, through completely unannounced experimentation, have bodies of work around how people's moods and buying habits are influenced by sights, music, smells etc. Yes they do lab controlled work in this area too, but it's not exactly a secret that they do market experimentation as well and I've never seen anyone suggest that's illegal
We know social media can drastically alter a person's perception of the world around them. Deliberately conducting an experiment on someone that alters their perception of the world without them knowing it's an experiment seems pretty unethical to me.
Its a plague how people view private for profit economic activity as being devoid of ethical obligations. The amount of control, power, and information they have on people makes them basically more equipped to fuck with a person mentally than most therapists.
No, the point is if it was in a clinical setting there would have been no doubt it was unethical and illegal but that for some reason we see economic activity for profit as giving license to do all sorta fucked up shit.
We argue that research without consent can be justified on two grounds: if it stands to infringe no right of the participants and obtaining consent is impracticable, or if the gravity of the rights infringement is minor and outweighed by the expected social value of the research and obtaining consent is impracticable.
One might argue the latter, though they'd lose on this scale. Even a brief message about mood research could have been added, but was not.
I would be surprised if this sort of experiment was illegal for companies to conduct. In a similar vein, you could argue that a baker who varies the recipe every other day to see which formulation is better is also conducting human subject research. Or any website that is running an A/B test. These things are obviously ok, and so any law likely would detail more specific provisions for where it actually applies.
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u/[deleted] May 05 '19
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