When I first became a Unix systems administrator back in 1991, I basically swore a blood oath to my employer (a NASA subcontractor) that I would never look at anyone’s email or personal files unless I was invited by that person to do so. You see when you’re a Unix admin, you have “root” priviledge, which lets you do anything, so it’s up to your own self-control not to do bad things. So I never looked at anyone’s information, and I further trained several other administrators to have this same oath. This brings me to Facebook’s recent acknowledgment that they treated 700,000 of their customers like lab rats. They manipulated the News Feed these people would see with more positive (or negative news) to see how these people would react. Regardless of Facebook’s intention, the fact is that they subjected 700,000 people to a test of this magnitude -- playing with their emotions, basically -- without asking for their permission to be involved in the experiment(s). This is pretty sad, and I hope Facebook will soon be slapped with a very, very large class-action lawsuit. (That this experiment happened in 2012 is also disturbing because it makes you wonder what they have done to people since that time.)
By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 30, 2014