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Consent only applies for things you wouldn't be allowed to do without consent in the first place. What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their
by travisoneill1 8y ago
Consent only applies for things you wouldn't be allowed to do without consent in the first place. What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? Clearly it wouldn't because there is no law against bad service. The fact that the click whores who call themselves journalists (who are also competitors of FB) call it "psychological experiments" to scare non-technical people is irrelevant.
- rapind 8y ago"What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? " To me, this could definitely qualify as "psychological experiments" if it were intentional as you describe. Most likely a failed and useless experiment though, but that's due to the medium and the difficulty to implement correctly (how would you guarantee none of your greeters step out of line? What if you wanted to quickly evolve and modify the experiment?). The fact is that it's much easier to run these sort of experiments on a web site than it is in meat space. It can also be much subtler and far more specific. It would be impossible to manipulate the variations in the real world as efficiently (or at all) like you can online. The ability to actually do this stuff efficiently and at scale is pretty recent, and we ought to consider and deliberate over the consequences.