[ephbit]

> ... be a non-consensual subject in psychological experiments.

This makes me think of this one fascinating/frightening prospect I sense in respect to the vast collections of data of human behaviour which the big tech corporations have: The data that Google and Facebook posess are so rich that they'd allow very insightful analyses of human behaviour. I recon there are so many small questions about why people do what they do, how their whole personalities are wired, how they influence each other through internet/analog interactions, how societies develop dynamically through which mechanisms.

Many of these questions are being studied by scientists at universities but they usually don't have the same huge/rich data sets that the internet giants have.

So Facebook & Co have a huge advantage in understanding all these things about humans over public research. But whenever they actually do some analysis and get answers, the result is by default internal knowledge that remains unknown to the public. Also, most of their analyses will be driven by commercial interest, rather than seeking anwers to philosophical questions that don't promise financial returns.

There are many questions about our world that could have been answered since years, using all this data ... but they haven't been and might never be.

Letting some big company have the power of understanding how people tick better than any other agent in the world. A thrilling prospect.