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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Bit Depth

Facebook users should know better

by

20140714

Af­ter all these years of ca­su­al mis­treat­ment by the busi­ness, one might have ex­pect­ed Face­book users to be a bit more lev­el-head­ed in their ex­pec­ta­tions from the ser­vice.

Even if all the fuss about posts be­ing wil­ful­ly sti­fled on Face­book's news­feeds in or­der to en­cour­age more paid ad­ver­tis­ing didn't seem rel­e­vant to the av­er­age user busy post­ing pic­tures of lunch, the flip­pant dis­re­gard that Mr Zucker­berg's wild­ly suc­cess­ful so­cial me­dia web site has for pri­va­cy and the in­tegri­ty of the in­di­vid­ual should have of­fered some in­sight in­to what the com­pa­ny was like­ly to get up to in the fu­ture.

So when it was an­nounced a cou­ple of weeks ago that a Jan­u­ary 2012 study had tai­lored the feeds of 689,000 Face­book users to see whether they re­spond­ed dif­fer­ent­ly to pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive posts to their time­lines, no­body should have been sur­prised.

Face­book's re­sponse to the con­cerns that arose when the pa­per was pub­lished in June was to point to its da­ta use pol­i­cy, which states that da­ta can be used "for in­ter­nal op­er­a­tions, in­clud­ing trou­bleshoot­ing, da­ta analy­sis, test­ing, re­search and ser­vice im­prove­ment."


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