A British regulator is investigating Facebook to determine if it broke data protection laws in its controversial “emotion” study.
Facebook studied 700,000 of its users without their consent in a psychological project. It manipulated news feeds by making either positive or negative messages predominate to see if recipients adopted the same emotions.
"The experiment manipulated the extent to which people were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed", read its report.
Now the Information Commissioner’s Office said it plans to question Facebook over the study. It has been reported as saying it will contact the regulator in Ireland, as Facebook's European operations are based in Dublin.
Facebook said it had taken "appropriate protections for people's information" and that there was "no unnecessary collection of people's data".
Media attention has focussed on the fact that participants in the study were unaware they were taking part.
The research was done to gauge if "exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours".
It found that users who had more positive stories in their news feed were likely to write a positive post, and vice versa.
The research was conducted in collaboration with Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco on 689,000 Facebook users over a period of one week in 2012.
