Mark Zuckerberg’s data privacy woes apparently haven’t ended with Cambridge Analytica: In California, a small band of nurses at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital are protesting having the Facebook CEO’s and his wife’s names attached to their institution.
The reason is what the group calls a threat to patient data. “We’re identifying Mark Zuckerberg’s role in performing unauthorized research,” Sasha Cuttler, R.N., told Entrepreneur.
“He and his wife gave $75 million in 2015 and that reminded me of an article I read in the New York Times about his involvement in research that was questionable,” Cuttler added. His reference was to 2014 news coverage of Facebook’s “emotional contagion” experiment. Researchers attached to the social media giant had manipulated the news feeds of almost 700,000 Facebook users, changing the number of positive and negative posts they saw, then studying the emotional effects.
An uproar ensued as observers rejected Facebook’s argument that its terms of service allowed for such a use of user data. The head of the study subsequently apologized, and no less prestigious a source as the editor-in-chief of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an “editorial expression of concern” questioning Facebook’s ethics.
Facebook’s actions involving human subjects, the editor wrote, “may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allow[ed] participants to opt out” (the main criteria of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, known as the Common Rule).
Update to May 12, 2018, when Cuttler and what observers called a handful of employees (of what is now formally called the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center) carried protest signs and dressed in traditional nursing outfits (along with at least one Frida Kahlo-impersonator — a bow to the fact that the famous artist once sought treatment there). The protestors also plastered tape over the Zuckerberg name on a sign in the hospital driveway.
Theirs was a controversial action that opponents like San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell and the U.K.’s Daily Mail and Fox News characterized as akin to biting the hand that fed them.
Yet the small band of protestors weren’t alone in their concerns. In 2015, when the hospital name was changed,…
