Facebook’s Secret Manipulation of User Emotions Faces European Inquiries

bits.blogs.nytimes.com - Facebook could be in hot water with Europe’s privacy regulators. The social network is facing potential investigations after it disclosed last week that it deliberately manipulated the emotional content of posts in the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users to see if emotions were contagious. The company did not seek explicit permission from the affected people — roughly one out of every 2,500 users of the social network at the time of the experiment — and some critics have suggested that the research violated its terms of service with its customers.