While I agree with your opinion, that data would still be Facebook/the advertisers' intellectual property and your actions could be considered infringing the terms you agreed with.
Though NYU may not have agreed to those terms, encouraging others to violate the terms and provide them the data could be considered the intellectual property damages needed to at least start a civil court case
They're not (I assume) copying the advert and storing it on their servers. I could see Facebook arguing that taking a copy of it is a violation of IP somehow.
But simply looking at the page and recording some of the meta data is the same as someone asking me on the phone "what advert did you just view?".
Would that be violating IP?
/sarcasm
I read something, now it is in my brain. Does Facebook still own it? I suspect they believe they do.
If they don’t like something you are doing, they can do whatever they like.
In addition, NYU didn't sign up to Facebook so they have no need to abide by their Terms. At least, they shouldn't have to abide by them... not sure what the laws in the US say about it.
I'm not for government intervention for things like this but the courts (I believe) have already ruled that scraping data is legit.
Edit: added that I think they shouldn't be able to have a say
It's not running on their servers at this point: It's on my computer.
Now, I don't know what the US laws exactly say about that but in terms of common sense, FB should not be allowed to make any claims to that data when it's on my computer.
Sure, they can say "well, no more data for you, you're banned" but that's a different argument.
In addition, having control over users of FB is one thing as they signed up to it and agreed to the terms but NYU didn't so I have no idea how they can even claim to enforce them especially if NYU are scraping data from the users computer (I assume they aren't making a connection to the FB servers!)
Also, not that it matters for this argument, I do not have a FB (or any social media) account: I tried it, maybe 10 years ago, and found it silly :)
Edit: Guys, this isn't Reddit! I'm all for downvotes but not drive-by downvoting... a simple "I downvoted you because..." would suffice.
Edit2: Mea Culpa! As has been pointed out, I replied to someone that wasn't actually commenting on my post... not sure how I missed that!
What say should Facebook have here though? I'd argue that when I am viewing data through my browser it's on my computer at that point. I've downloaded it so why should Facebook be allowed to decide what I can and cannot do with it any more than they can decide what I can do with my emails that I also view on my computer?