[knowtheory]

Yeah, that's falling directly into Facebook's talking points. It's a web extension, anybody can inspect the source. It doesn't do what Facebook is claiming. The NYU team bends over backwards to ensure that no personally identifying information about other users gets captured.

The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform.

https://twitter.com/issielapowsky/status/1422879438765797380

[jensensbutton]

So Facebook, who just paid a 5 billion dollar fine to the FTC for allowing exactly what these researchers are doing, should adopt a policy of examining the source code of every update to any extension used for scraping data to determine whether it's allowed or not? Is that the other option?

[amadeuspagel]

> The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform.

Yeah? That also seems like a completely legitimate concern.

[ceejayoz]

But it's public info?

> When Facebook said Ad Observer was collecting data from users who had not authorized her to do so, the company wasn't referring to private users' accounts. It was referring to advertisers' accounts, including the names and profile pictures of public Pages that run political ads and the contents of those ads.

It's all on https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/. Scraping just lets them analyze it.

[secondcoming]

But was that data still collected without consent?

[input_sh]

I'd say installing an extension is a pretty big sign of consent. It's named clearly and clearly describes what it does in the first sentence of the description:

> A browser extension to share data about your social feed with researchers and journalists to increase transparency.

I'd call that type of data gathering quite consensual.