Gadgetory

life is just one big experiment called Facebook I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNET update the world has yet another reason to distrust Facebook more than six hundred and eighty thousand Facebook users have been subjected to a psychological experiment and it was done without the knowledge of the participants the network's set out to see if it could manipulate users emotions and it worked with academia to conduct a week-long test back in January of 2012 those chosen for the experiment either saw only positive posts in their feed or they only saw posts with negative words the studies showed that if you saw mostly happy words you are a little more positive in what you shared in your status update and you're slightly more negative when you're subjected to a week of doom and gloom now we learned of this because the study was published in a science journal and adding to the ethical problems the study was funded by the government Facebook was toying with people's mental health but why to learn if advertisements could take advantage of our moods if you aren't posting much well Facebook cranked up the kittens to get you happy again with any study the typical ethical practice is to get informed consent from your subjects so people know they're part of an experiment Facebook says it was fair game to test us because of one word hidden deep in the data use policy you know that document that none of us read it states that your information may be used for internal operations and research when I think of research in that context I think of Facebook wanting to study where I click not that I want Facebook to use me as a lab rat to see if it can make me sad I wouldn't be surprised if an organization perhaps the Federal Trade Commission goes after Facebook for not being clear over how this research data was being used but going forward if enough people speak out and complain or shy away from using Facebook well then it could take a hint and it might be more transparent about future experiments the network is on shaky ground as it is now with public trust and even if you don't care to be tested on you should care about this because Facebook is collecting health information Facebook owns the fitness tracking app called moves and as fitness tracking bands and smartwatches grew in popularity we have to wonder what sort of health information will Facebook have on us and can we trust what it does with that data well let's switch gears to Google's social network no not Google+ not that Buzz thing I mean Google's first social network it's called Orkut and after 10 years Google is shutting it down Orkut was really big in Brazil and India but it'll close on September 30th google says it rather focused its energy on YouTube blogger and Google+ that's your tech news update you can always get more details on these stories at cnet.com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey