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The Information Commissioner’s Office is planning to question Facebook over its psychological study on users without their consent.
The UK regulator has said that it will be contacting Ireland’s data protection regulator over the issue due to Facebook’s European headquarters being based in Dublin.
The study saw Facebook manipulate the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users to control what type of statuses they were exposed to.
It found that those who had fewer negative stories in their news feed were less likely to write a negative status, and vice versa.
The research, conducted in collaboration with Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, has been criticised because Facebook users were unaware they were taking part.
While Facebook has since apologised, it has also tried to justify the experiment saying that it did not compromise anyone’s privacy.
