Facebook is in trouble in the UK over its controversial experiment that saw it manipulating the emotions of hundreds of thousands of users for a week.
The Financial Times reports that the UK’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), is looking into whether Facebook infringed any data protection laws when it carried out the experiment. It has to determine this based on how much personal data was used, and whether users gave their consent. Other than interrogating Facebook, it is said that the ICO will also approach Ireland’s data regulator, because Facebook’s European headquarters is located in Dublin.
Facebook’s brewing trouble in Europe comes as Google has started removing outdated entries from its search results under Europe’s recently introduced ‘right to be forgotten’ law.
➤ UK data regulator probes Facebook over psychological experiment [Financial Times]
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Read also – Facebook’s emotion experiment wasn’t just another A/B test, and we need to be ‘algorithm-savvy’
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