When people learned about the news that Facebook had manipulated its users' feeds as part of a psychological experiment, it made them angry. They claimed that what the social media site did was unethical. Then, a question was raised on the legal side of the issue. Apart from being unethical, Facebook's user feed manipulation may have broken the law as well, as claimed by two law professors at the University of Maryland.
The law professors, Leslie Meltzer Henry and James Grimmelmann, stated their allegation in a letter addressed to the state attorney general of Maryland and in a blog post. They allegedly claimed that Facebook and online dating company OKCupid violated House Bill 917. It's a state statute in Maryland that cover federal protections for humans as research subjects which is applied to all the research done in the state.
According to the bill, research scholars should both secure consent from research subjects and approval from the institutional review board. The law professors also added that HB 917 applies to all types of research that involve a human subject.
"What Facebook and OkCupid did wasn't just unethical. It was illegal," said Grimmelmann. "A common assumption is that even if research laws ought to apply to private companies, they don't. But that assumption is false. Facebook and OkCupid are bound by research laws, and those research laws quite clearly prohibit what they did."
OKCupid admitted that they lied to users by making bad dating matches and claiming that these types of matches were actually great matchmaking choices.
In July, Henry and Grimmelmann began their argument by saying that Facebook may have deceived its users after secretly conducting psychological experiments on 700,000 of its subscribers.
"The failure to disclose research is an omission that a reasonable consumer would consider material in deciding whether or not to use a service," stated by the professors in a letter addressed to the Federal Trade Commission.
With all these allegations on hand, Grimmelmann requested that Attorney General Doug Gansler of Maryland prohibit Facebook and OkCupid from running social experiment tests on residents of the state.
As response, Facebook privacy lawyer Edward Palmieri said [pdf] that "the federal Common Rule and the Maryland law you cite were not designed to address research conducted under these circumstances, and none of the authorities you cite indicates otherwise."
Christian Rudder, OKCupid CEO, claimed "if we hadn't had run that experiment, we basically are doing something terrible to all the users." In other words, Rudder believes that everyone conducts research without asking anyone's permission. He added that once a person uses the Internet, he automatically places himself as the subject of hundreds of experiments.
