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SALT LAKE CITY — There's a chance you were part of a massive psychology experiment and you didn't even know it.
For one week in 2012, Facebook altered the news feeds of more than half a million users, showing some more upbeat posts while showing others negative posts.
Facebook leaders watched to see the response.
Two years later, after publishing the results, the online response is not surprising.
"This little Facebook experiment was just the motivation I needed to finally kick it to the curb. Thanks Facebook," one Facebook user posted.
But Facebook says the study fell within its privacy policy, which every user agrees to.
Did you read the fine print? It took one law professor more than eight minutes to make sense of it, and he's a professional.
“It’s purposefully generalized,” he said. “You could read it three times and still not know really what they’re doing with your information.”
The truth is, people agree to policies like this every day. It's estimated it would take 30 days, reading eight hours a day, to read all the fine print that people checked “yes” to.
They're very complicated documents. Google's is over 4,000 words; eBay 5,000; and Linked In's policy is 8,000 words.
Industry experts like Nilay Patel of Vox.com say Internet companies live and die by how they can use their customer's information.
“Facebook is in a really tricky balance between making great use of the data it collects and will collect in the future, and not irritating everybody so much that they will go away,” Patel said.
In response to the outrage, Facebook explained it did the research to "improve services and make the content people see as relevant and engaging as possible."
Legal experts warn the public that if they aren't willing to share all that information, they should probably not use Facebook.
The Facebook study was published in the March issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
