Makes sense. Last time a university wanted to scrape user data from from Facebook users (with their permission) "for research purposes", it didn't end so well for Facebook.
Except that Cambridge University did not scrape any data from Facebook nor were they behind Cambridge Analytica. Aleksandar Kogan was a former assistant Professor at Cambridge University who subsequently developed and sold an app to Strategic Communication Laboratories(SCL), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. That's the entirety of the connection to Cambridge University.
This NYU project is the very antithesis of Cambridge Analytica. This project is part of The Online Political Transparency Project. All of the data is public:
>"The Facebook Ad Observatory is part of the Online Political Transparency Project, which operates from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. This nonpartisan, independent project is focused on improving the transparency of online political advertising, by deploying traditional methods used in cybersecurity to evaluate the vulnerabilities of online sites. The Project builds tools to collect and archive political advertising data, and makes these available publicly. We encourage journalists and researchers to use these to fuel analysis of online political advertising."
Cambridge Analytica got most of their data from a university researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who promised Facebook the data was being used only for academic research but was secretly handing it over to Cambridge Analytica.
