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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the these-are-not-the-data-you're-looking-for dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0245

A data set of more than 3 million Facebook users and a variety of their personal details collected by Cambridge researchers was available for anyone to download for some four years, New Scientist reports. It's likely only one of many places where such huge sets of personal data collected during a period of permissive Facebook access terms have been obtainable.

The data were collected as part of a personality test, myPersonality, which, according to its own wiki (now taken down), was operational from 2007 to 2012, but new data was added as late as August of 2016. It started as a side project by the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre's David Stillwell (now deputy director there), but graduated to a more organized research effort later. The project "has close academic links," the site explains, "however, it is a standalone business." (Presumably for liability purposes; the group never charged for access to the data.)

Though "Cambridge" is in the name, there's no real connection to Cambridge Analytica, just a very tenuous one through Aleksandr Kogan, which is explained below.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/anyone-could-download-cambridge-researchers-4-million-user-facebook-dataset-for-years/


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:49AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:49AM (#681527) Journal

    Why is it flamebate?

    I dunno. This is why I wait with baited breath, and a bated hook, to baet the flame that will troll the moths to the camera over a Christian truck.
    https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/bate [leo.org]

    Go away! 'Bating! (Idiocracy, 2006, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ [imdb.com] )

    Starting Score:    1  point
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