Casey Johnston

[Commentary] Facebook scared some of its privacy-conscious users by revealing that it performed a scientific study on manipulating the emotional content of users' News Feeds.

Since the study came to light, the company has been accused of acting unethically -- even illegally -- by subjecting its users to an experiment without notice or consent. While the implications of the study are a little frightening, Facebook's study might actually have been a responsible thing to do. Some of the professors who did help with the study are with universities that are federally funded and subject to the Common Rule of the Institutional Review Board, which regulates how human subjects are used.

This makes the whole issue less clean-cut. Facebook did not have to publish the results the way it did, in a publicly available scientific journal.

Dr Nita Farahany, director of Duke University's master program in bioethics and science policy, points out that Facebook's experiment may not qualify as human subject research. "Facebook’s 'research' falls into a relatively new and under-theorized category of threats to individual autonomy," Farahany told Ars. "Advertisers attempt to manipulate human emotions through advertisements, A/B testing, subtle changes in wording all the time. And they attempt to measure the effects of those differences. Is this different?"

YouTube is getting ready to block music videos from artists that haven't agreed to the contract terms for its upcoming subscription service, the Financial Times reported.

The videos set to get the boot include those from independent record labels and artists including Adele and Arctic Monkeys. The new subscription service for videos will charge a monthly fee but will let users watch videos on YouTube without ads.

FT noted that the service will also allow users to watch videos "even when not connected to the Internet" on any device, suggesting some sort of pinning or downloading infrastructure to go with the platform.

Robert Kyncl, YouTube's head of content and business operations, told FT that record labels representing 90 percent of the music industry have agreed to the contract terms that include provisions for the subscription service. But YouTube will apparently not let the 10 percent that have resisted carry on as ad-supported-only videos, and Kyncl told FT that the blocking will begin in a matter of days.

As promised, Netflix has raised its streaming subscription fees for new users to $8.99, from the $7.99 price it set three years ago.

The price hike was promised in the company's most recent shareholder letter, where it stated that past subscription plan changes taught the company a lesson about changing too much too quickly.

The outcry was swift and virulent. Netflix recanted on the rebrand, though the prices stuck. This time around, Netflix is being more cautious. The company hinted heavily in its shareholder letter that the price increases were coming as a result of the paid peering arrangements the company has struck with providers like Comcast and Verizon, which were damping the site's traffic on the accusation that it uses too much of their resources.

The price increase applies only to new subscribers.

Three researchers from IBM have developed an algorithm that can predict a Twitter user's location without needing so much as a single geotag from them.

According to the Arxiv paper on the subject, the location prediction comes largely from assessing the similarity of the content of a user's tweets to other users' tweets who do use geotags, which turns out to be a decent predictor.

The authors of the paper created their algorithm by analyzing the content of tweets that did have geotags and then searching for similarities in content in tweets without geotags to assess where they might have originated from. Of a body of 1.5 million tweets, 90 percent were used to train the algorithm, and 10 percent were used to test it. Using this system, the researchers could predict a user's city with 58 percent accuracy -- far from deadly aim, but statistically significant nonetheless. Larger regions could be predicted with increasing levels of accuracy, with 66 percent on a state level and 73 percent on a time zone level.

[Commentary] WhatsApp founder Jan Koum asserted that Facebook's acquisition of his company does not mean that WhatsApp's internal values will change.

Koum called speculation that WhatsApp will turn traitor to its users' data not just "baseless and unfounded" but "irresponsible," countering the concerns of privacy advocates.

Since Facebook laid out its $19-billion plan to acquire WhatsApp, both users and expert onlookers have derided the partnership as an opportunity for Facebook to make a massive data-grab to correlate with its own user information troves. Per WhatsApp's privacy policy, the company stores virtually no customer information, not even phone numbers -- messages are associated with a phone number "dynamically" on each device, according to Koum. WhatsApp's statements are not only strong, but highly unusual.

While ownership has transferred, Koum now has a seat on Facebook's board of directors, so he is still positioned to protect the app. It's refreshing to see an app founder not only stick to his guns, regardless of what those guns are, but also stand up for pro-consumer privacy policies.

But there are some side concerns about WhatsApp's commitments, too, in light of the number of security flaws the app has displayed, including vulnerabilities that expose message histories locally and allow sent communications to be easily decrypted. While the app ideologically protects its users, it seems to have some trouble putting its ideas into practice.