All around the world, security agencies have been lambasted for trawling for private data. Facebook was the first to reveal, in its annual reports, that governments and agencies were making requests for data from the social media giant to snoop on members.

Then came the bombshell that the United States’ National Security Agency had tapped into people’s data around the world, as leaked by Edward Snowden. On a local level, Malta was startled to learn that Malta’s Security Services were one of the biggest snoops when it came to demanding data from mobile phone carriers – in the interests of national security.

As the world continues to advance in the field of digital technology, we have seen both the positives and negatives of social networking. We saw how young Arabs mobilised themselves to fight off oppression in the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

But we have also seen how an increasingly plugged in younger generation is falling prey to the pitfalls of internet trolling that has even led to people being treated for suicidal thoughts, and those who have paid the ultimate price in taking their own lives.

The more we plug in, the more we are susceptible to abuse and the more we are susceptible to our own whims in terms of giving away too much information and disseminating too much about ourselves to a worldwide audience. Not only does that lead to the possibility of our data being mined, but also to surveillance by the authorities and identity theft by scammers.

But now the inevitable has happened. It has emerged that Facebook itself has violated norms and ethics by preying on unwary users in a ‘psychological experiment’ which was intended to see whether users’ moods could be altered by subjecting them to images and posts in their newsfeeds.

Facebook, on its part, has failed to answer whether any Maltese were involved in their study which involved some 689,003 unaware users.

The aim of the experiment was to determine if they could alter the emotional state of their users through the automatic removal of certain posts containing words associated with positivity or negativity. Facebook attempted to test whether users would post more positive or negative posts depending on what was viewed on their newsfeed.

Whatever the aim was, the fact that it was done illicitly, without people knowing and without their consent makes it wrong. And this, again, shows us how susceptible we are. Facebook has become a dominant feature in the lives of billions around the world. The fact that we give and share our data so freely makes us ignorant and completely at the mercy of a software giant that looks like it is becoming a major world player. Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It might not be 1984, but George Orwell’s vision of Big Brother might be a lot closer to home than government and security agencies. We have given Big Brother the power and Big Brother is all around us.