Thursday News: Facebook’s many experiments, Canada’s new anti-spam law, World Book Night US says goodnight, and two writers debate book categories
Publishing NewsCanada / diversity / Facebook / immigrant fiction / informed consent / Literary fiction / privacy / research / spam / World Book Night8 Comments
Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits – Now here’s a surprise (not): Facebook seems to think it can do whatever the hell it wants to its users, because you’ve signed a TOS (which apparently now says your data can be used for research). the Data Science group has basically worked with few to no boundaries, and according to one scientist who spent a year with the group said, “Tests were run so often, he said, that some data scientists worried that the same users, who were anonymous, might be used in more than one experiment, tainting the results.” Supposedly there are “stricture guidelines” now, though. Suuuuure there are. And people think Amazon is evil?!
Thousands of Facebook Inc. users received an unsettling message two years ago: They were being locked out of the social network because Facebook believed they were robots or using fake names. To get back in, the users had to prove they were real.
In fact, Facebook knew most of the users were legitimate. The message was a test designed to help improve Facebook’s antifraud measures. In the end, no users lost access permanently.
The experiment was the work of Facebook’s Data Science team, a group of about three dozen researchers with unique access to one of the world’s richest data troves: the movements, musings and emotions of Facebook’s 1.3 billion users. –Wall Street Journal
Here’s what you need to know about the new Canadian anti-spam law that is freaking everyone out – As of July 1, 2014, Canada has the world’s strictest anti-spam law, and because marketing technologies are aimed at breaking down, rather than reinforcing international borders, this law will affect any spam sent to a Canadian, no matter where the sender resides. Fines of $1M for individuals and $10M for businesses sound pretty frightening, although corporations and attorneys are already protesting the new law. Moreover, social media seems to be exempt, and the government appears to be most interested in big offenders. Still, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens with this legislation, both inside and outside Canada.
But my company is not even based in Canada! Will I get fined anyways?
Good point. The government says the law applies to anyone who sends spam to someone in Canada, but enforcing that is another matter. The agency will have its hands full just trying to apply the law in the first place, let alone tangling with complicated cross-border issues.
What Canada will do is try and work with other governments to go after the worst of the worst, which is what it does when it comes to telemarketers. In Canada’s own words: “[We will ] share information with the government of a foreign state if the information is relevant to an investigation or proceeding in respect of a contravention of the laws of a foreign state that is substantially similar to the conduct prohibited by this Canadian law.” –Gigaom
World Book Night U.S. calls it quits – Despite some of the best publicity in the event’s history, 2014 Book Night US will be the last for now, with employees remaining on a volunteer basis until September to wrap up operations and meet the event’s remaining obligations. If you are unfamiliar with World Book Night, it’s an annual event held on a single day in April, where the goal is to spread the love of reading by giving away books. This year, about half a million books were distributed. Apparently the company even applied for grants, and was not successful in securing adequate funding for another year of operation. World Book Night US’s Chairman also happens to be Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch.
The problem in the U.S. was the cost of, production, organization and distribution. “The expenses of running World Book Night U.S., even given the significant financial and time commitment from publishers, writers, booksellers, librarians, printers, distributors, and shippers, are too high to sustain without additional outside funding,” executive director Carl Lennertz wrote in a statement. –Los Angeles Times
Are Categories Like Immigrant Fiction and ‘New American’ Fiction Valid or Worthwhile? – Pankaj Mishra and Francine Prose debate the value and validity of categorical labels like “immigrant fiction.” Prose says that initially she was opposed to the idea of categories, but then began to contemplate the issue from the perspective of how books connect to each other within a loose relationship that allows readers to choose one book on the basis of their experience of something similar. As long as those connections are not essentialized: “When categories get less interesting is when the category becomes the whole point — the substance and the basis of how a book is read.”
This is an experience very familiar to genre readers. However, categories can also ghettoize, as Mishra cautions:
Writers like Gary Shteyngart (Russia), Aleksandar Hemon (Bosnia), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Yiyun Li (China), Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic) and Dinaw Mengestu (Ethiopia) have bypassed the old lines of connection between Europe and America. The ethnic and linguistic communities they belong to are spread across the United States rather than concentrated in the East and the Midwest. They may have grown up speaking Mandarin, Igboand Spanish at home; some of them fled disorderly societies and despotic regimes. But their advantages of class or education — and renewable intimacy with the mother country in the age of the Internet and cheap air travel — clearly mark them out from the huddled immigrant masses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. –New York Times
It’s a shame about World Book Night US shutting down. Hope they somehow manage to secure funding to restart.
Sitting here in the pre-dawn hours each morning hammering out my dissertation, it seems outrageous to me the incredible violations of informed consent in social science research that these Facebook studies represent. Good grief. Having completed reams of IRB paperwork, I can’t imagine trying to justify these research methods.
I thought this article made a good point that FB’s messing with timelines may well have had unintended consequences for relationships as well as emotional states.
There are days that the irony in the news just amuses me. The Government of Canada has passed the CASL legislation which will only prevent legitimate businesses from sending emails to customers and potential customers without consent or a prior customer relationship (I’m simplifying it a lot – whole day-long seminars were given on this legislation). It won’t stop the Viagara emails, the “you have inherited millions in some foreign country” or the other truly annoying and bogus emails at all because it will be impossible to enforce. Meanwhile, Facebook (and probably Google, Twitter and other such entities) are permitted to use the data we post or the searches we conduct for whatever “research” they wish to engage in without impunity and based on some dubious implied consent contained in Terms of Service, which at law (at least in Canada) probably does not constitute consent at all.
Thanks for posting about the Facebook issues. Maybe if enough people become aware of what is going on, someone will be compelled to act to try to address it.
@Ros: Thanks for that link, Ros. I’ve been sharing a lot of these articles with our systemwide mental health director, because we still don’t know what the fallout from this is going to be on our college and university campuses (or has been, without anyone knowing its source), as students are among the most ardent Facebook users.
The other that hasn’t been mentionned much is, companies have THRE years to bring changes to the way they connect with their Canadian customers. Three. Years. I’ve already had 50+ companies email me over the last couple of months to ask for my consent so I don’t think it’s an impossible task.
So should I sue Facebook, because I’m pretty sure I was part of the “no access” test. I had to jump through some serious hoops to prove I was a person and I remember being really freaked out and upset. There was this paranoid sense of “oh god, they’ve found me” and my usual “what if I’m not real?” neurosis. Ah, the joys of mental ill-health.
I spent days complaining about Facebook on Twitter, but I finally got back on in time to see my farm — which I’d been obsessively cultivating for months — withered and dead. I’ve never regained my trust in them, and when I was told a few weeks later AGAIN that I wasn’t a person, though I regained access, I stopped using their service except for automatic blog reposts. Even now, people friend me and I’m just like “Dude, I don’t want to mess with that thing. Meet me on Twitter or LJ.”
And btw, I’m still upset about my farm. I was seriously invested, like to the point of scheduling my life around being there to take care of my crops, and to see them all dead… I know it wasn’t real, but it FELT real. And my poor animals making that “We’re dying, you animal abuser!” sound was horrible.
@Harper Kingsley: That is an interesting point, the Facebook games that people get very invested in.
This latest experiment, it’s not like it was just targeting ads at users or collecting the usual usage data. It actually interfered with users’ feeds. For the length of the study, Facebook didn’t work as advertised.
If you were a negative test subject, it removed positive posts from your feed. If you were a positive test subject, it removed negative posts from your feed. So users, who rely on Facebook to keep in touch with family, maybe didn’t get that sad post about so-and-so’s death. Because they were part of a secret experiment about emotions.
How is that useful as a social network? Facebook has made itself unreliable.