Facebook bans researchers who were investigating Facebook ads

Re:Facebook bans researchers who were investigating Facebook... by daxuak on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:09PM (#28064266)

Facebook has no business in dictating what plugins the users would like to have on their browsers. Sure they can ban scraping because reasons, but both this or the Cambridge Analytica case are not data-leak unless we are assuming that a user's personal data, contents they generated and their social relationship status are all Facebook's property.

Acadamic use vs commercial use is a separate topic too imho.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook bans researchers who were investigating Facebook... by Sebb767 on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:40PM (#28064584)

Well yes, but they can dictate whether you can use their service with these add-ons (or at all, for that matter).

And irrespective of this opinion, CA backfired spectacularly on them, so it's not totally unreasonable for them to enforce that right.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook bans researchers who were investigating Facebook... by daxuak on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @02:49PM (#28064701)

I agree with you that they have the right to deny service, and scraping at scale is not same as regular queries. Suggesting FB's react was meant to protect (not theirs) data is what I feel not about right, though.

[ Parent | on HN ]