A recent flap over a controversial use of Big Data analyzation techniques by Facebook has once again spurred calls for the more ethical use of data-gathering tools by companies.

Earlier this month, Facebook drew fire for an โ€œexperimentโ€ that studied how users’ news feeds could be manipulated to affect their moods.  The so-called โ€œemotional contagion experimentโ€ involved nearly 700,00 users, all of whom, according to Facebook, agreed to the privacy parameters set forth in its Terms of Use agreement that allow such tinkering.