Facebook banned accounts of three New York University researchers on Tuesday for reportedly using scraped data, after months of trying to work with them by giving them the data they needed in a “privacy-protected way.”
Facebook disables accounts associated with NYU’s Ad Observatory Project
Facebook says that NYU’s Ad Observatory Project used political ads using unauthorised means to access and collect data from Facebook, violating their Terms of Service. The tech company was forced to act on this to protect people using the app from data scaping.
The researchers reportedly stole the data by creating an extension programmed to evade Facebook’s detection systems and scrape data such as usernames, ads, links to user profiles, which the tech company claims some were not even viewable on its platform. The extension apparently also collected data of people who did not install the extension on their browsers.
The data is reportedly archived in a now offline and publicly available database.
What started the feaud between Facebook and NYU’s Ad Observatory Project?
Earlier this year, Facebook invited researchers, including those from NYU, to “safely” use US 2020 Elections for ad targeting. The war transpired after NYU’s Ad Observatory Project researchers declined to use the data acquired through FORT’s Researcher Platform that Facebook hosted, and used the scraped data instead.
The famous social media platform has since been writing a series of posts about data scraping including where they stand with regards to this act.
“We have a dedicated External Data Misuse (EDM) team made up of more than 100 people, including data scientists, analysts and engineers focused on our efforts to detect, block and deter scraping,” Product Manager Director, Clark Mike wrote in a blog post.
The EDM team would also investigate suspected scrapers to learn more about what they are doing to their systems and find ways to prevent them and make their systems stronger.
Mozilla says Facebook’s claims about scraped data are wrong
Mozilla Firefox says that Facebook’s claims are wrong because researchers and organisations like itself are supposed to release data for analysis with regards to misinformation on platforms like Facebook. Mozilla wrote this in a lengthy blog post on Wednesday.
“In our view, those claims simply do not hold water. We know this, because before encouraging users to contribute data to the Ad Observer, which we’ve done repeatedly, we reviewed the code ourselves,” Firefox’s Marshall Erwin says.
“Before Mozilla decided to recommend Ad Observer, we reviewed it twice, conducting both a code review and examining the consent flow to ensure users will understand exactly what they are installing,” Erwin adds.