But while what happened with Mr. Kogan’s Facebook data set is now known, the fate of other information hoards is murkier. Some academics said the data could have been easily copied and sold to marketers or political consulting firms. The potential result is more leakage of Facebook users’ information through academic circles, said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a professor of political communication at the University of Oxford who has studied data collection from Facebook. It’s hard to imagine how Facebook stops that from happening.”The Times reviewed half a dozen Facebook data sets compiled by academics from 2006 to 2017. Another set, from 2013, by a group of Norwegian academics focused on the civic engagement of 21 million Facebook members on four continents.

Source: New York Times May 06, 2018 21:00 UTC