Informed Consent vs.Terms of Service

When scientific research involves humans as test subjects,it is the researcher's job to guard the welfare of the test subjects. One of the basic ways of doing this is by asking every human test subject to read and sign an informed consent prior to experimentation.

For this week's discussion, please:

1) Familiarize yourself with Informed Consent via this primer from the University of North Carolina - Charlotte.NOTE: You don't need to memorize this web page! But you will need this information to understand the violation described in the second and third readings...

2) Facebookconducted a social science research experiment on its users. While all users complete a Terms of Service agreement to use FB, FB didn't collected explicit informed consent from its users/human test subjects. Please read these two articles:

a) Facebook study sparks soul searching and ethical questions. from TheWall Street Journal

b) The journal that published Facebook's psychological study is raising a red flag about it. from The Washington Post