I think it's mostly that scientific ethical standards developed out of a history of bad experiments, but the ethical breeches we think of w/r/t corporations are very different, and the context switch is jarring. Not to mention that the idea of a corporation running a social experiment with a substantially scientific purpose is novel to most people, and this one in particular is easy to understand.
It's not explicitly political.
Given the NSA scandal, the topic of privacy is very much political and a lot of people don't like facebook or other big web companies even when they use their products.
To get back to academia vs. corporations academia openly shares information about experiments while business doesn't.
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