Facebook Faces Government Probe Over Study That Manipulated Users' Emotions Without Telling Them

Facebook faces a government investigation in Europe over its study of whether manipulating people's news feeds could change their emoti Reportedly recently,Facebook's experiment tweaked the algorithms of nearly 700,000 unwitting users, causing people to see an abnormally low number of either positive or negative posts. People who saw more negative posts wrote more negative posts, and vice versa, showing that their mood was being affected by the kinds of things they were reading on Facebook.

Now, governments in the U.K. and Ireland look set to investigate, according to the Financial Times:

The Information Commissioner's Office said it was probing the experiment and planned to ask Facebook questions after widespread outrage when it was revealed at the weekend. The regulator said it would also be in contact with the Irish data protection body, because Facebook has its European headquarters in Dublin.

A spokesperson for the ICO said it was too early to tell exactly what part of the law Facebook may have infringed. The regulator looks at how much personal data are used and whether users have given their consent.

Facebook won't be helped by the fact that the company didn't alter its terms of service to disclose to users that their posts would be used for research until four months after the experiment took place, according to Forbes:

Four months after this study happened, in May 2012, Facebook made changes to its data use policy, and that's when it introduced this line about how it might use your information: "For internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement." Facebook helpfully posted a "red-line" version of the new policy, contrasting it with the prior version from September 2011 - which did not mention anything about user information being used in "research."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg need not lie awake stressing over the outcome of any probe, however. The ICO only has the power to levy a fine of up to £500,000 ($857,000), the FT says - which is pocket change in terms of the $3 billion that the social network holds on its balance sheet.

Google Shutting Down Orkut Social Network

Google Inc will shut down its early social-networking service, Orkut, which was launched ten years ago but has failed to put Google ahead in what has become one of the Web's most popular businesses.

Google said it will shut down Orkut, which is widely used in Brazil and India but hasn't caught on more broadly, on Sept. 30, to focus on its other social networking initiatives.

The company declined to say how many users Orkut has.

"Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell," Google said in a post on the Orkut blog post on Monday.

Orkut was launched early in 2004, the same year that Facebook Inc, now the world's No.1 social network with 1.28 billion users, was founded.

The service's shutdown comes as Google's social networking plans remain in question. In April, Vic Gundotra, the head of Google's social networking services, left the company.

Gundotra oversaw the 2011 launch of Google+, a social networking service similar to Facebook. Gundotra said in October that 300 million users visit the Google+ web page every month.

Google has increasingly sought to position Google+ less as a social networking "stream" that competes with Facebook, and more as a means of establishing a unified "user identity" system to improve Google's various Web properties. Last year, for example, Google began requiring users of its YouTube site to sign in with their Google+ identity before posting comments about videos.

The company said it would preserve an archive of all Orkut "communities" that will be available from Sept. 30.

"If you don't want your posts or name to be included in the community archive, you can remove Orkut permanently from your Google account," Google said.