Oh, Facebook

摘要

We've all, more or less, come to terms with the fact that the price for all of these "free" online services-email, apps, social networks, etc.-is having all manner of advertising shoveled our way. Most of us have learned to tune it out-except, perhaps, for those creepy ads that follow you around the internet, like if you've looked at a pair of shoes on Zappos, and you keep seeing ads for them on other sites you visit. Online tracking is ... unsettling, but there are ways of making it stop (bit.ly/lpXNTQd). You probably already knew, at least on some level, that your internet use has basically turned you into a laboratory animal. Entities of all sorts-benign and not so benign-are interested in observing what you do online. In late June, there was quite the uproar when it was revealed that researchers, including some at Facebook, had tinkered with the newsfeed content of hundreds of thousands of Facebook's users in order to experiment with mood manipulation. Apparently, this came to light after the results of this study, "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks," were published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).