Facebook imbroglio

Recently I wrote a story for SearchDataManagement that largely centered on one of this year's big data imbroglios. That is the Facebook-Cornell Emotional Contagion study. This was the topic at Friday night symposium (Oct 8) capping the first day of the Conference on Digital Experimentation at MIT.   You could sum up the germ of imp of the story as: it is okay to personalize web pages with financial purpose, and to fine tune your methods thereof, but could that overstep an ethical boundary?

On the MIT panelist but not covered in my brief story was Jonathan Zitrain of Harvard University Law. For me, he put the contagion study into context- contrasting and comparing it to the Stanford Prison experiment and the Tuskeegee prisoner studies, which came under scrutiny and helped lead the way to some standards of decorum for psychological and medical experiments.  "There out to be a baseline protection," he said. There is a fiduciary responsibility, a need for a custodial and trusting relationship with subjects, that at least are an objective in science studies of humans.

Now, this responsibility, forwarded by Zitrain and others, remains unstated and vague. Clearly, the Internet powers that be are ready to move on to other topics, and let the Facebook experiment fade into the recesses, as even Snowden's NSA revelations have. I think a professional organization is needed – that sounds old school, I know and I don’t care. As with civil engineering, there is no need for a new generation to figure out what is overstepping – for waiting until the bridge collapses. – Jack Vaughan

Related

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jzittrain
http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/opinion/Facebook-experiment-points-to-data-ethics-hurdles-in-digital-research
http://codecon.net/