If it's product samples for the purpose of research then yes, it does require informed consent. Same for blind taste tests.

The difference is the purpose of the research. Facebook was not attempting to gain commercial insight, they were attempting to modify and monitor psychological behaviours, to gain generalised insight. This is not market research.

What you're referring to is nothing like what happened here. What they did was generalised psychological research. It was not commercial research, where the sole purpose is to test the commercial viability of a product or gain other commercial insights. What they did requires informed consent, which demands that they make all participants aware of the researchers, the nature of the study, the purpose of the study, and get explicit authorisation to include them.

Facebook broke the law. Period.

No, because in other countries, what they did is blatantly illegal.

Listening, no.

Sharing what you've heard for fun and profit, yes.

Freedom of assembly. Freedom of speech.

How do you tell a small businessman that others can organize and raise funds to win an election and he can't? How do you make that argument to the NRA or the NAACP? The teacher's union or the EFF?

This is as blatantly corrupt a political argument as I have ever heard expressed.

I don't care whether the voice comes from the right or the left.

I do care when the reformer starts to think that because he has the money and the power, he alone has heard the voice of God --- and that anything he does is perfectly all right.

Every industry has a technological base and a social reason for its existence.

Taxi services have a long history of abuses which the geek conveniently chooses to forget. Perhaps because for him the taxi is a convenience and not a necessity.

In a neighboring city, black and poor, the only accessible, affordable, suburban sized supermarket is a cab ride midtown.

In the hospital district.

What begins as tragedy ends as farce.

How does this help when the tower has to know how to bill the call?

Actually, you're budgeting less - because Creative Cloud is cheaper than paying for a CS upgrade annually.

In all fairness, Adobe's "Creative Cloud" offering is actually more cost-effective than paying for Creative Suite was. At about $1000 for Photoshop Extended alone, plus $200 for Lightroom, total $1200. Assume you upgrade once every 3 years, that's $400 a year. Compare that to $10 a month for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC - that's $120 a year. You can see the benefits.

They eventually revealed the reason they only show your content to a subset of your followers:

So they could charge you to reach more of them. Seriously. You can pay to "promote" your posts, and all that does is increase the reach within the people that have explicitly indicated interest in your content.

That's not informed consent as it would be deemed by any research institution or court of law. Informed consent requires a discussion with the subject on the nature of the research, its purpose, the manner in which data will be collected and used, and an explicit agreement from the user. What Facebook thinks it has is implied consent - which they frankly don't have either.

This study is just plain unlawful.

In the early days, ca. 1880, the telephone company owned the phone and the wire.

At least one local telephone exchange in the Northeast began experimenting with phonographic music-on-demand over the lines about ten years later.

The courts began looking at the use of the public airways for paid subscription services no later than the 1920s. Then and now such services were regarded by the courts as far too useful to be compromised by the cheap and the greedy.

Then and now the courts have had no trouble whatever assigning different rights to the energy which falls from the sky and the information it may carry.

more like a fixed array of antennas serving a great many people.

and marketed to the same audience that began subscribing to community antenna services in the late 1940s.