The New York Times reports on academics who have gathered Facebook user information through data-scraping tools. A group of researchers from Sweden and Poland was able to track the behavior of 368 million Facebook users by scraping every interaction from 160 public pages for two years, while University of Cambridge Psychology Professor Aleksandr Kogan gathered data used by Cambridge Analytica. “Even if almost everyone in the academic community is careful and protects the data, you still can end up in a situation where someone is careless or acts in bad faith and sells access,” University of Oxford Professor of Political Communication Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said. Meanwhile, a U.S. judge shot down a request from a Cambodian political leader to get information from Facebook in his fight against the government.
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