The Data Protection Commissioner is committing to take the necessary steps to address any complaints made to his office by Facebook users in relation to a recent study of nearly 700,000 users without their consent.
He pointed out that since Facebook had no representation in Malta it was not considered as a data controller to be regulated by the Data Protection Act.
However, he would be following developments on the investigation by other competent authorities, including the UK regulator.
Facebook’s study saw the ‘manipulation’ of users’ newsfeeds to control which emotional expressions they were exposed to.
The study is the subject of a probe by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK as to whether data protection rules were breached.
Facebook’s European headquarters are based in Dublin.
Data Protection Commissioner Saviour Cachia told Times of Malta he would follow up any complaints made to his office.
“In the event that we will have a complaint by a data subject in Malta in this regard, steps will be taken to coordinate with a data protection authority in another member state,” he said.
The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK plans to question Facebook over the study.
The company said it was happy to answer questions regulators could have but it defended its study saying there was no unnecessary collection of people’s data, the BBC reported yesterday.
If we have a complaint by a data subject in Malta, steps will be taken to coordinate with a data protection authority in another member state
The research was conducted in collaboration with Cornell University and the University of California in San Francisco.
It changed the newsfeeds delivered to almost 700,000 people for a week in 2012 without getting their consent to be studied.
Some got more sad news, others more happy updates. The aim was to assess whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours.
It found that users who had fewer negative stories in their newsfeed were less likely to write a negative post, and vice-versa.
The study also raises concerns because it suggests that social networks can manipulate the emotions of their users by tweaking what is allowed into a newsfeed.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier in June but sparked outrage after a blog post last Friday said the study used Facebook users as “lab rats”.
According to the authors of the study, it was all perfectly legal.
Using an algorithm that can recognise negative or positive words, the researchers were able to comb through newsfeeds without actually viewing any text that may have been protected under users’ privacy settings.
“As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s data use policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research,” the authors wrote.