Let's not forget that Aleksandr Kogan - the guy who harvested the Cambridge Analytica data was a research associate at Cambridge. Can facebook trust all the researchers at NYU? Can't one of them just leak and sell the scraped data? There are no guarantees that the scraped data will be used for just academic purposes. Facebook probably doesn't want another data-leak fiasco.
Facebook has no business in dictating what plugins the users would like to have on their browsers. Sure they can ban scraping because reasons, but both this or the Cambridge Analytica case are not data-leak unless we are assuming that a user's personal data, contents they generated and their social relationship status are all Facebook's property.
Acadamic use vs commercial use is a separate topic too imho.
I agree with you that they have the right to deny service, and scraping at scale is not same as regular queries. Suggesting FB's react was meant to protect (not theirs) data is what I feel not about right, though.
Users should decide who gets to use their data, not Facebook.
And there's no guarantees with any data. Facebook itself can't be trusted to not have leaks. Two years ago, data from 500m profiles was leaked, Zuckerberg's own Facebook id, mobile phone number, and other information.
There's a fallacy of composition and awareness here.
Individual users:
1. May not be aware of how data are being used. (In fact this is a virtual certainty.)
2. Don't appreciate the immense power of data in aggregate. (Something that is close to Facebook's key commercial advantage.)
3. May be exposing data on other users, who are not participating and/or don't consent to particupate in such data hoovering.
I'd argue that Facebook can also make exceptions, and that good-faith, well-reviewed research projects, particularly those aimed at independently assessing manipulation and propaganda efforts on the platform, are a case I'd strongly recommend. But to say that Facebook has no right or obligation to decide is false on its face.
Keep in mind that when evaluating a research proposal, Facebook will have zero interest in evaluating the "good faith"-ness, or "well-reviewed"-ness of the proposal. And to be fair they are probably not qualified to do that, and would have no incentive to become qualified.
As a business, making a business decision, they'll want know "can this come back to bite us" (and they will miss many of the ways that might happen), and, how much will this benefit us either in money or in facilitating new ways of making money with the new information.
>"There are no guarantees that the scraped data will be used for just academic purposes"
The whole point in the project is to make the scraped data available to anyone and everyone who is interested. They publish this data via a public database. This is articulated very clearly at the top of the Ad Observatory project page.
"Ad Observer is a tool you add to your Web browser. It copies the ads you see on Facebook and YouTube, so anyone can see them in our public database."[1]
The Ad Observatory project collects the following:
"What we collect
The advertiser's name and disclosure string.
The ad's text, image, and link.
The information Facebook provides about how the ad was targeted.
When the ad was shown to you.
Your browser language."
Additionally the code for the browser plugin is up on github[2]. How much more transparent could they be?
I like how people change Alex to Aleksandr when they’re trying to make a point about the big scary Russians, despite Alex being a fully American citizen.
Of course it’s much easier to blame muh Russia than it is to blame Facebook, who created the platform and by definition set its boundaries. They literally gave all the information to Aleksandr. All he did was read their documentation and query their API endpoints as designed and officially documented.
He literally followed Facebook’s instructions to get the data they offered to him. And yet here you are using weirdly ethnic overtones to denigrate him as some evil hacker that victimized Facebook by pilfering some nebulous “private” information that Facebook worked so hard to protect.
You're reaching a bit. His Wikipedia page lists his name as "Aleksandr Kogan". The OP didn't mention Russia at all, nor did he mention anything about him being evil. It's true that Facebook instructions to get the data - that was the whole point. The app users were installing never said that the data would be used in the way it ended up being used.
It might be a reach to ascribe malice to OP in this case. But the pattern persists, and the fact he’s known more as Aleksandr than Alex is more the result of agenda pushing in the “reliable sources” than of a common policy to use full names. I’m sure you will find many instances of the same sources using nicknames for people they like.
It’s the same reason Fox News says “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” instead of the more common “AOC.”
His page on the Cambridge website, as well as his Twitter account, also use "Aleksandr". So far, there are multiple examples shared on this thread of him being referred to as Aleksandr and none of "Alex". Do you have _any_ source indicating that he prefers to go by the latter, let alone enough to conclude that there's a racist conspiracy afoot?
> It’s the same reason Fox News says “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” instead of the more common “AOC.”
Wouldn't you expect a news organization to use the full name for a politician instead of a colloquial term, regardless of how they feel about them? They don't say RBG either for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite the fact that Internet conversations use it heavily.
I know this is a radical viewpoint these days, but it turns out that not literally everything is about race.
