Acadamic use vs commercial use is a separate topic too imho.
And irrespective of this opinion, CA backfired spectacularly on them, so it's not totally unreasonable for them to enforce that right.
And there's no guarantees with any data. Facebook itself can't be trusted to not have leaks. Two years ago, data from 500m profiles was leaked, Zuckerberg's own Facebook id, mobile phone number, and other information.
Individual users:
1. May not be aware of how data are being used. (In fact this is a virtual certainty.)
2. Don't appreciate the immense power of data in aggregate. (Something that is close to Facebook's key commercial advantage.)
3. May be exposing data on other users, who are not participating and/or don't consent to particupate in such data hoovering.
I'd argue that Facebook can also make exceptions, and that good-faith, well-reviewed research projects, particularly those aimed at independently assessing manipulation and propaganda efforts on the platform, are a case I'd strongly recommend. But to say that Facebook has no right or obligation to decide is false on its face.
As a business, making a business decision, they'll want know "can this come back to bite us" (and they will miss many of the ways that might happen), and, how much will this benefit us either in money or in facilitating new ways of making money with the new information.
My reply to that addresses some of your concerns as well.
TL;DR: the call is not entirely Facebook's to make. Perhaps not at all.
The whole point in the project is to make the scraped data available to anyone and everyone who is interested. They publish this data via a public database. This is articulated very clearly at the top of the Ad Observatory project page.
"Ad Observer is a tool you add to your Web browser. It copies the ads you see on Facebook and YouTube, so anyone can see them in our public database."[1]
The Ad Observatory project collects the following:
"What we collect
The advertiser's name and disclosure string.
The ad's text, image, and link.
The information Facebook provides about how the ad was targeted.
When the ad was shown to you.
Your browser language."
Additionally the code for the browser plugin is up on github[2]. How much more transparent could they be?
[2] https://github.com/CybersecurityForDemocracy/social-media-co...
Of course it’s much easier to blame muh Russia than it is to blame Facebook, who created the platform and by definition set its boundaries. They literally gave all the information to Aleksandr. All he did was read their documentation and query their API endpoints as designed and officially documented.
He literally followed Facebook’s instructions to get the data they offered to him. And yet here you are using weirdly ethnic overtones to denigrate him as some evil hacker that victimized Facebook by pilfering some nebulous “private” information that Facebook worked so hard to protect.
It’s the same reason Fox News says “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” instead of the more common “AOC.”
> It’s the same reason Fox News says “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” instead of the more common “AOC.”
Wouldn't you expect a news organization to use the full name for a politician instead of a colloquial term, regardless of how they feel about them? They don't say RBG either for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite the fact that Internet conversations use it heavily.
I know this is a radical viewpoint these days, but it turns out that not literally everything is about race.