http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/02/technology/social/facebook-experiment/index.html
Facebook has apparently acknowledged the error of their ways, as far as experimenting on us goes, after facing such an uproar about the breach of privacy and user trust their experiments caused. I'm not sure how I feel about these experiments; I feel that an A/B test would probably be okay, as long as the user agrees to it. I personally am a web administrator (and architect) for a website, and one of the site's main goals is to give users what they want. Therefore, I think any experiments should be opt-in instead of opt-out. At the same time, I feel that a website's owners can definitely monitor the endpoints that are being used on the server, but not the information that is sent across, nor to where it goes, without express permission from the user.
Yes, this is a very important issue, and as we discussed in class, the notion of privacy , among other things, are being challenged by the internet. Maybe it's time that we as a society take a step back and consider this issue more seriously so that problems such as this one can be avoided.
ReplyDeleteI ike your idea to opt in rather than opt out, too often we are opted into 500 things we didn't even know were happening, like Comcast having a hotspot inside of my router that gives free internet to my neighbors and slows my internet down... really?
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying I agree with what they did, but if you know someone is collecting data from you, you'll behave differently. It might work out for if they have people opt-in to be guinea pigs for any type of experiment, rather than individually choosing; that way the user doesn't know what kind of experiment is happening, and they've already given their permission.
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