Saturday, March 10, 2018

Condemn Facebook snooping if you will, but we are all part of a great big online experiment

1So, Facebook has been in the dock after

publishing details of a supposedly sinister experiment it oversaw several years ago. It involved monitoring the moods of around 700,000 users based on their posts. The research also established that it was possible to affect those moods by posting positive or negative content in the users’ news feeds.

The reaction has been highly negative, with many people raising concerns about the implications for privacy online. Whether or not you think they are right, they could probably do with an update on what has been happening online these past few years.

We are entering into an era where data is king, where our every move, our every emotion and every contact can be tracked. With the increasing analysis of social media activity, there is often very little that we do that can be hidden from the organisations we interact with online.