[Air-L] FB statement on banning NYU researchers for scraping

[Joly MacFie]

[if anyone already mentioned this, I missed it]

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/research-cannot-be-the-justification-for-compromising-peoples-privacy/

Research Cannot Be the Justification for Compromising People’s Privacy
August 3, 2021
By Mike Clark, Product Management Director

For months, we’ve attempted to work with New York University to provide
three of their researchers the precise access they’ve asked for in a
privacy protected way. Today, we disabled the accounts, apps, Pages and
platform access associated with NYU’s Ad Observatory Project and its
operators after our repeated attempts to bring their research into
compliance with our Terms. NYU’s Ad Observatory project studied political
ads using unauthorized means to access and collect data from Facebook, in
violation of our Terms of Service. We took these actions to stop
unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy
program under the FTC Order.

The researchers gathered data by creating a browser extension that was
programmed to evade our detection systems and scrape data such as
usernames, ads, links to user profiles and “Why am I seeing this ad?”
information, some of which is not publicly-viewable on Facebook. The
extension also collected data about Facebook users who did not install it
or consent to the collection. The researchers had previously archived this
information in a now offline, publicly-available database.

We offer researchers <https://research.fb.com/> a number of privacy-protective
methods
<https://about.fb.com/news/2021/01/increasing-transparency-around-us-2020-elections-ads/>
to
collect and analyze data. We welcome research that holds us accountable,
and doesn’t compromise the security of our platform or the privacy of the
people who use it. That’s why we created tools like the Ad Library and
launched initiatives like Data for Good <https://dataforgood.fb.com/>
and Facebook
Open Research & Transparency (FORT <https://fort.fb.com/>) — to provide
privacy-protected APIs and data sets for the academic community.

We told the researchers a year ago, in summer of 2020, that their Ad
Observatory extension would violate our Terms even before they launched the
tool. In October, we sent them a formal letter notifying them of the
violation of our Terms of Service and granted them 45 days to comply with
our request to stop scraping data from our website. The deadline ended on
November 30, long after Election Day. We continued to engage with the
researchers on addressing our privacy concerns and offered them ways to
obtain data that did not violate our Terms.

Earlier this year, we invited researchers, including the ones from NYU, to
safely access US 2020 Elections ad targeting data
<https://research.fb.com/blog/2021/02/introducing-new-election-related-ad-data-sets-for-researchers/>
through
FORT’s Researcher Platform. This offered the Ad Observatory researchers a
more comprehensive data set than the one they created by scraping data on
Facebook. The researchers had the opportunity to use the data set, which is
designed to be privacy-protective, instead of relying on scraping, but they
declined.

We made it clear in a series of posts
<https://about.fb.com/news/2021/04/how-we-combat-scraping/> earlier this
year that we take unauthorized data scraping seriously, and when we find
instances of scraping we investigate and take action to protect our
platform. While the Ad Observatory project may be well-intentioned, the
ongoing and continued violations of protections against scraping cannot be
ignored and should be remediated.

Collecting data via scraping is an industry-wide problem that jeopardizes
people’s privacy, and we’ve been clear about our public position
<https://about.fb.com/news/2021/04/how-we-combat-scraping/> on this as
recently as April. The researchers knowingly violated our Terms against
scraping — which we went to great lengths to explain to them over the past
year. Today’s action doesn’t change our commitment to providing more
transparency
<https://about.fb.com/news/2021/01/increasing-transparency-around-us-2020-elections-ads/>
around
ads on Facebook or our ongoing collaborations with academia. We’ll continue
to provide ways for responsible researchers to conduct studies that are in
the public interest while protecting the security of our platform and the
privacy of people who use it.

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Joly MacFie  +12185659365
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