EPIC Complains to FTC About Facebook Emotion Study (corrected)

CORRECTION: Our headline originally stated EFF filed the complaint.

A leading privacy group filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over a 2012 study in which Facebook manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users of the social network to see what effect the changes would have on their emotions.

The group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Facebook had deceived its users and violated the terms of a 2012 consent decree with the FTC, which is the principal regulatory agency overseeing consumer privacy in the United States.

“The company purposefully messed with people’s minds,” the advocacy group wrote in its complaint. “At the time of the experiment, Facebook did not state in the Data Use Policy that user data would be used for research purposes. Facebook also failed to inform users that their personal information would be shared with researchers.”