Facebook threatens action against NYU researchers for highlighting ad data discrepancies

Facebook Inc is demanding New York University to stop its research project that is looking into the company's political-ad-targetting practices. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to two NYU researchers, who are working on a project with over 6,000 volunteers to collect data on political advertisements that the social media giant publishes. Facebook has accused NYU of collecting information from its platform without the company's permission and has asked them to delete it. 

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'May face action' 

As per the report, Facebook's privacy policy official, Allison Hendrix on October 16 wrote a letter to the researchers of NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, saying that their data collection project violates the company's terms of service as it prohibits data collection from its platform. Hendrix further warned that if the University doesn't stop collecting data and cease the project they may face "enforcement action". 

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NYU's Tandon School of Engineering launched a project last month called Ad Observatory, which collects data from Facebook Ad Library, a voluntary service that was launch by the company in an effort to be more transparent when it comes to ad spending by specific people or group and the audience that it targets. However, Ad Observatory pointed out serious discrepancies in the data that Facebook was providing about political ads. The researchers said that the California-based tech firm was routinely missing out on providing data about political ads such as information about the targetting that determines who sees the ads. 

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"When we began to compare these two sources of information on Facebook political ads — the Facebook Ad Library and the Ad Library Reports — we found they were riddled with errors and inconsistencies. Our cybersecurity analysis shows vulnerability in Facebook’s transparency algorithms that reveals they routinely miss including political ads in its public archive.," Laura Edelson, one of the researchers on the project said in a blog post. 

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