...Facebook are treading on truly dangerous ground with this experiment. It is more example of the “thin edge of the wedge” manipulation evident in public media, through doubtful advertising!

...Subliminal advertising is as old as the first movies, where subliminal advertising was inserted into frames of film which flashed an advertisers message on the silver screen, to be absorbed subconsciously by the viewer! This “all too subtle” form of advertising was outlawed long ago, for obvious reasons!

Read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

One question from me about Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg. How much business do they do in this country and do they pay any meaningful tax? Otherwise just another vampire on our nation no matter what sneaky tricks they are up to. Stevenroger.

Let me see if I have this right.

People who use Facebook do so under the terms and conditions that are determined by... Facebook, yes? They have a clear choice to use it, or not use it. Facebook is not compulsory, it is entirely voluntary. If you place an item on Facebook - a picture of yourself being almost as popular as a picture of a cat - you are voluntarily placing it into the public domain. Any illusions you may have to the contrary are erroneous.

Facebook is a multi-billion dollar business. It makes its money through exploitation of the relationship you have with its services, which include the aforementioned voluntary relinquishment of those aspects of your privacy that you explicitly agreed to when you started to use their service.

It is hardly an issue, surely, when the company legitimately uses its own platform to perform experiments on you. Why would they need to ask your permission, when they have observed all their legal responsibilities to you?

Building an article out of such highly-confected faux-outrage seems pretty pointless to me, unless you are the sort of person who goes through life with a permanent chip on the shoulder about the iniquity of big business. Facebook is not the only firm that exploits our social vulnerabilities, after all.

[Disclosure: yes, I have a Facebook account. No, I don't post pictures of cats]

This is just about the saddest thing I've ever seen...

"...when we engage with social media we're only ever given a window into the best lives of others.

Hardly anyone takes to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to talk about the less attractive or boring parts of their lives. Reading the selectively entered posts of others, we can begin to feel less upbeat about our own lives."

If what is witnessed on blogs, tweets, posts and comments represents the BEST I can assure you that I feel really, really upbeat about my own life and ashamed of huge swathes of the rest of internetted humanity.

[Even though funny cat videos and virtual choirs provide some compensation.]

Because you are feeling precious about 'your' data, Mr. Fletcher, one approach would be to regard the internet as an electronic version of something omniscient and omnipresent and to not upload anything you wouldn't want digitally penetrated by such a god.

With my marketing hat on, I can tell you that Facebook is dynamite because of the access to the data - in both large volumes, and in granular detail. One of our Digital marketing experts, Luke Chaffey (http://www.lukechaffey.com.au) has written about this at some length.

With my concerned citizen hat on, I can tell you, privacy is a HUGE concern. Really crazy amounts of your information, measurements of your behaviour, how you respond to different stimulus etc. A stack of data that the average person wouldn't ever have considered. It's frightening. Some of Luke's articles (which are really worth a read) can be found at http://www.kbbdigital.com.au/news and at https://au.smallbusiness.yahoo.com

Read the fine print fools. How many times do you have to be told.
When you sign up for facebook you are presented with terms and condition and if you click agree then you have voluntarily handed all your rights to your privacy, data, words etc to mr zuckerburg and his associates.

No use winging about it now.