Facebook Privacy Again in the News
For more than a decade, professors, doctoral candidates and researchers from academic institutions around the world have harvested information from Facebook, reports the New York Times, adding that have compiled “hundreds of Facebook data sets that captured the behavior of a few thousand to hundreds of millions of individuals, according to interviews with more than a dozen scholars.
“Their practices came to light in March when The New York Times and The Observer of London reported that Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychology professor, had obtained the data of up to 87 million Facebook users through a quiz app. Mr. Kogan sold the information to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm with ties to the Trump campaign, so it could build psychographic profiles of American voters. Last week, Cambridge Analytica said it would cease operations after the uproar over its use of personal information.
“But while what happened with Mr. Kogan’s Facebook data set is now known, the fate of other information hoards is murkier. In many cases, the data was used for research or scholarly articles. The information was then sometimes left unsecured and stored on open servers that offered access to anyone. Some academics said the data could have been easily copied and sold to marketers or political consulting firms.”
More here.
