[Air-L] Forbes story on FB, Social Science One and GDPR

[Joly MacFie]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/05/23/gdprs-massive-research-exemption-facebook-and-social-science-one/
[excerpt]

Many of the research outputs of Social Science One that will be published
in academic journals will directly benefit Facebook’s own commercial
interests and effectively perform commercially beneficial research in
proxy. Asked how this is handled under GDPR, especially given the privacy
legacy of “research” like that of Cambridge Analytica, the Commission again
emphasized that GDPR applies to research but also affords numerous
exemptions for research.

Stepping back, Social Science One will enable researchers from all across
the world, including those whose labs are primarily funded by adversarial
governments engaged in misinformation operations against the EU, to freely
mine the most intimate personal and private EU citizen data. That data may
eventually include medical records, financial information, intimate
photographs, communications and information regarding minors, highly
sensitive vulnerable population membership and other enormously sensitive
information shared over social channels EU citizens thought were private.
EU citizens are prohibited from opting out of this research and both
Facebook and the initiative have strangely declined to guarantee that
content and accounts deleted by users will not be preserved for permanent
researcher access. Even active manipulation and intervention in EU
elections has not been ruled out. Moreover, despite its much-vaunted
privacy safeguards, those protections may be rapidly exhausted due to the
initiative’s research design, while other Facebook initiatives that use
similar privacy protections acknowledge that they still pose a privacy and
safety risk and thus require a layer of professional gatekeepers that are
not part of the Social Science One model.

All of this would appear to be permissible under GDPR and in fact the
entire initiative may even find itself exempt from any GDPR regulation at
all.

This raises the question of just what benefit GDPR actually provides to the
citizens of the European Union when their right to digital privacy, the
protection of their data and the freedom to not be mined and manipulated
seems little changed from the pre-GDPR era.

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Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
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