Facebook decides to disable university research account, violates terms of service and endangers user's privacy
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In recent years, fake news and advertisements spread on SNS have greatly influenced election results, so a research team at New York University analyzed political advertisements displayed on Facebook in line with the 2020 US presidential election. Ad Observatory Project ” has started. However, Facebook announced that the project was ``accessing Facebook data in an illegal way'' and disabled Facebook accounts related to the research team.
Research Cannot Be the Justification for Compromising People's Privacy - About Facebook
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/research-cannot-be-the-justification-for-compromising-peoples-privacy/
Facebook Disables Accounts Tied to NYU Research Project - Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-03/facebook-disables-accounts-tied-to-nyu-research-project
New York University's Ad Observatory project is a research project to investigate what kind of political advertisements are displayed on the user's Facebook screen and what kind of people the advertisements are targeting. The research team released a tool called ' Ad Observer ' as a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on, and collected various information about Facebook's political advertisements through volunteers who installed Ad Observer.
However, in October 2020, Facebook requested researchers to 'disable the tool and delete the collected information,' saying that Ad Observer's data scraping violated the terms of service. In fact, since the summer of 2020, before the tool was released, Facebook warned researchers that the tool violated the terms of service.
Facebook asks researchers to remove 'research tools to visualize political advertisements' - GIGAZINE
by Spencer E Holtaway
In February 2021, Facebook opened access to ` ` ad targeting data for the 2020 US presidential election '' for researchers. Mike Clark, director of product management at Facebook, claims that 'this provides Ad Observatory researchers with a more comprehensive dataset than data scraping through Ad Observer.' .
However, the research team refused to use the dataset provided by Facebook and continued to collect data by data scraping. And on August 3, 2021, Facebook finally announced that it had disabled the Facebook accounts and apps of people belonging to the research team of the Ad Observatory project and blocked access to the platform.
Ad Observer seems to have circumvented Facebook's detection system and collected data such as user name, advertisement, link to user profile, reason why a particular advertisement was displayed. Clark said that the information collected by the research team included information not published by Facebook, as well as information from users who did not have Ad Observer installed and did not consent to data collection. pointing out.
“The New York University Ad Observatory project studied political ads using deceptive methods that violated Facebook’s terms of service to collect Facebook data,” Clark said. In line with the privacy program mandated by the 'Ongoing and continuing breaches of protection cannot be ignored and must be remedied.'
Previous research from the Ad Observatory project has shown that Facebook displays ads from Democrats to people interested in topics related to former President Barack Obama, and ads from Republicans to people who like conservative commentator Sean Hannity. It is clear that appropriate advertisements are displayed for each target, such as displaying advertisements. In this way, the mechanism of tracking user interests and delivering targeted advertisements according to their preferences is important for Facebook's business model.
However, Apple's newly introduced `` App Tracking Transparency (ATT) '' from `` iOS 14.5 '' allows users to refuse tracking for advertising purposes, and Facebook and advertisers have been hit hard .
Meanwhile, the overseas media The Information reported that 'Facebook is trying to analyze encrypted WhatsApp messages.'
Facebook Researchers Hope to Bring Together Two Foes: Encryption and Ads — The Information
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-researchers-hope-to-bring-together-two-foes-encryption-and-ads
Facebook wants to crack WhatsApp encryption for ads - Android Authority
https://www.androidauthority.com/whatsapp-encryption-ads-2728774/
The chat app WhatsApp features end-to-end encryption, so even WhatsApp, which operates it, cannot know what users are communicating. However, Facebook has hired new researchers and is aiming to develop 'a method of analyzing encrypted chat without decrypting'.
By maintaining the encryption itself, it is theoretically possible to collect data from chats without violating user privacy. Regarding Facebook's efforts, The Information reported that the purpose was to ``deliver targeted advertisements based on the content of WhatsApp chats.''
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