Facebook News Feed Experiment Probed by U.K. Data Regulators
This article is for subscribers only.
Facebook Inc. is being investigated by the U.K.’s data-protection authority after a study showed a psychological experiment influenced what users saw in their news feeds, raising fresh privacy concerns.
A company researcher apologized on June 29 for a test in January 2012 that altered the number of positive and negative comments that almost 700,000 users saw on their online feeds of articles and photos. Disclosure of the experiment prompted some members to express outrage on Twitter about the research as a breach of privacy.