Facebook wants the NYU Ad Observer to quit collecting data about its ad targeting

The social media giant said it may change its code to thwart the data scraping

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/10/23/21531232/facebook-nyu-ads-politics-data-election

Facebook wants a New York University research project to stop collecting data about the social platform’s political ad-targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program violates its terms of service, which bar scraping.

A Facebook official sent a letter to the Ad Observatory researchers October 16th, saying that “scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us.” The letter also threatened further enforcement action if the project did not shut down and delete the data it has collected, according to the WSJ. The company could change its own code to block the NYU team from collecting further data, a Facebook spokesperson told the WSJ.

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