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Comment by ndkwj | Hacker News Reader

Seems reasonable that using a tool that massively gathers and exfiltrates data from a website gets you banned.

Yeah, that's falling directly into Facebook's talking points. It's a web extension, anybody can inspect the source. It doesn't do what Facebook is claiming. The NYU team bends over backwards to ensure that no personally identifying information about other users gets captured.

The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform.

https://twitter.com/issielapowsky/status/1422879438765797380

So Facebook, who just paid a 5 billion dollar fine to the FTC for allowing exactly what these researchers are doing, should adopt a policy of examining the source code of every update to any extension used for scraping data to determine whether it's allowed or not? Is that the other option?

> The privacy leak that Facebook is so concerned about is actually the identity of advertisers on their platform.

Yeah? That also seems like a completely legitimate concern.

But it's public info?

> When Facebook said Ad Observer was collecting data from users who had not authorized her to do so, the company wasn't referring to private users' accounts. It was referring to advertisers' accounts, including the names and profile pictures of public Pages that run political ads and the contents of those ads.

It's all on https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/. Scraping just lets them analyze it.

The comment that I'm replying to argued that facebook is concerned about the privacy of advertisers, and I argued that this concern is legitimate. If you don't agree that facebook is concerned about the privacy of advertisers, maybe you should reply to the comment that actually made this claim?

I don't agree with your claim. I'm arguing the concern is not legitimate.

But was that data still collected without consent?

I'd say installing an extension is a pretty big sign of consent. It's named clearly and clearly describes what it does in the first sentence of the description:

> A browser extension to share data about your social feed with researchers and journalists to increase transparency.

I'd call that type of data gathering quite consensual.

You're also granting the extension access to your friends' data, given that it can see everything that you can. Your friends consented to show that data to you, but not to the extension developer. Your friends' consent is not transitive.

When I was a regular FB user I understood when I share stuff with friends that it might be visible to their browser extensions. Ubt I feel your comment is sort of misdirection as the purpose of the browser extension was to collect information on ads in peoples feed. Advertisers might show up in your feed, but that doesn't mean they're your friends, even if you consented to receive ads by signing up with a petition organizer or political campaign.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com