Facebook Offers Details on How It Handles Research
Facebook published new details on how it conducts research using the personal information it collects on Facebook users, amid a flurry of efforts to create privacy and ethical standards for corporate research involving human data.
Facebook collects data on roughly 1.6 billion people, including “likes” and social connections, which it uses to look for behavioral patterns such as voting habits, relationship status and how interactions with certain types of content might make people feel. To assess the ethical impact of each research effort, the company has established a five-person standing group of Facebook employees, including experts in law and ethics. The company declined to identify the five members of the board, which can consult outside experts if deemed necessary. If a manager determines that a research project deals with sensitive topics such as mental health, the study gets a detailed review by the group to weigh risks and benefits, as well as to consider whether it is in line with consumers’ expectations of how their information is stored. Managers have the authority to simply approve proposals that they deem more innocuous. Which research gets a full review is up to the discretion of the manager. The review group is modeled on the institutional review boards, or IRBs, that assess the ethics of human-subject research at academic institutions.