LinkedIn experiment changed job prospects for millions — and it raises red flags: privacy experts Academics suggest Canada needs stricter laws on consent and how companies use people's data A five-year study by LinkedIn on nearly 20 million of its users raises ethical red flags since some unknowing participants in the social experiment likely had job opportunities curtailed, experts in data privacy and human resources suggest.The online networking and social media platform randomly varied the number of strong and weak acquaintances present in users "People You May Know" suggestions to test a long-held theory: that people are more likely to get a new job through distant acquaintances than they are close contacts.The resulting study, published in Science Magazine on Sept. 15, by LinkedIn, MIT, Stanford and Harvard researchers, confirmed the idea: users shown contacts with whom they had only 10 mutual friends doubled their chances of a new job, compared to those shown people with 20 mutual friends.Given the possible consequences, it's unlikely many people would knowingly consent to have their network, and livelihoods, manipulated as they were for the study, said Jonathon Penney, a law professor whose research focuses on internet, society and data policy at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School.And the study had been subject to an institutional review board for human subject research, unlike Facebook's hidden 2014 psychological experiment, which sparked investigation from British data protection authorities."