If you've ever looked at ads and suggested pages that Facebook recommends for you, you may have thought, "Is that what Facebook really thinks of me?" or "Man, Facebook knows me so well." Either way, you know that the social network is watching what you put in your profile, what you say in your statuses and what posts you "Like" to get some sense of the kind of user you are.
Most of us probably choose to ignore the fact that this is happening because Facebook has become such a part of our daily routines, we don't really take too long to think, "If I like this new profile pic of my friend, how will this affect what I see on Facebook?" However, when Facebook's News Feed experiments made headlines this past June, people took notice. The fact that Facebook scientifically altered the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users by removing positive or negative posts to see how it would affect user behavior seemed like it made everyone feel a bit icky.
The general response to that secret experiment prompted Facebook to issue an apology of sorts. Its Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer posted a blog post addressing the matter on Oct. 2.
"Although this subject matter was important to research, we were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and criticism," Schroepfer wrote. "It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently."
Well, that was nice of Facebook to finally comment on the incident three months later, wasn't it? However, just because Facebook recognized that it was in the wrong for the way it carried out that experiment doesn't mean it's going to stop doing research on you. Oh no.
