Facebook is closing its doors to researchers in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The latest casualty is the app Netvizz, a research tool used by hundreds of academics to gather public Facebook data, that the social network has recently banned. The app has gathered more than 300 academic…
27 posts tagged
Cambridge Analytica
Social media must evolve beyond data mining
As Congress and the public wrestle with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, many people are now realizing the risks data collection poses to civic institutions, public discourse and individual privacy. The U.K.-based political consulting firm didn’t just collect personal data from the 270,000 people who used researcher…
This is why doxxing is so scary
It’s almost a given that you have personal information available online. Beyond social media and online discussion boards, there are public records of property ownership and voter registration, as well as massive databases of financial information assembled by credit-rating agencies. Taken individually, many of these pieces of information are…
Data ethics and diversity
If the recent Cambridge Analytica data scandal has taught us anything, it’s that the ethical cultures of our largest tech firms need tougher scrutiny. But moral questions about what data should be collected and how it should be used are only the beginning. They raise broader questions about who…
Internet privacy issues have been simmering for a while
The world erupted in righteous indignation after it was revealed that Facebook had inadvertently allowed a researcher to harvest personally identifying information belonging to millions of users, a large percentage of whom were unknowingly affected, courtesy of loopholes in the enforcement of policies and regulation of Mark Zuckerberg’s most…
State Sovereignty in the Internet age
If we had to distill part of what defines a nation's sovereignty, it would possibly come down to four key factors. Namely: Energy independence Financial independence Military independence Food independence I am aware that there are other factors that determine whether a state is sovereign or not, but, for the…