The United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) launched an investigation to find out whether Facebook Inc. violated data protection rules when the social media giant staged a psychological experiment in January 2012.
The experiment, which affected at least 700,000 users, sought to find out whether emotions could be affected by just seeing their friends' posts in their News Feeds. By altering what users saw in their feeds and analyzing over 700,000 posts of Facebook users, the researchers concluded that emotional stress could affect people even if they were not physically in the presence of one another.
The social networking site published the results of their experiment last week. A lot of people reacted in shock, stating that they never remember being invited to join the experiment. Facebook, meanwhile, pointed out that all users agreed to participate in studies such as this one by agreeing with the company's privacy policy.
"The study was done with appropriate protections for people's information and we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have," a Facebook spokesman said in an email, as quoted by Reuters.
The ICO is slated to investigate the matter, and has reportedly planned to have an inquisition session with Facebook. It is not yet clear which provision of the data protection laws Facebook violated. If proven guilty, the social networking giant could be fined as much as 550,000 pounds, or almost $1 million.
Internet privacy debates began after former U.S National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden revealed how the U.S government spied on their people. They said espionage was carried out by other international agencies - some of which were present in Europe.
Facebook is not the only Internet site under fire in U.K. Google was ordered to comply with the "right to be forgotten" rule by removing some search engine results that were considered obsolete and detrimental to users. The rule was expected to take down large amounts of private online information stored in Google's search engine.
