Facebook wants the NYU Ad Observatory to quit collecting data about its ad targeting
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
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 is 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…
