Do they also have to be academics? And what about funding?

It seems that to a large extent that was the central problem with the "emotions" experiment. On the whole, we're hardly aware of the fact that Facebook is playing around with the way our News Feed is arranged, or for that matter that Google is constantly tweaking the order that results show up after we conduct a search. But when academics get funding to conduct an experiment they're expected to maintain certain ethical standards.

So who gets to be called a scientist? Certainly many of the people working at Facebook and at Google are scientists, but they're on a private payroll, and have to report only to the company.