Social Media:The Real Russian Data Danger

(Forbes) For all the concern and calls for FBI investigations over FaceApps Russian provenance it is worth remembering that Facebooks vaunted academic research initiative its collaboration with SSRC known as Social Science One will be making the personal intimate data of Facebooks two billion users available for data mining and has refused to ban Russian researchers working directly for the Russian intelligence agencies. Why is a simple face changing app yielding such a backlash over the nationality of its developers when there has been little concern over Facebook opening its archives of its two billion users for data mining by researchers including those working directly with those very Russian intelligence services Senator Schumer fears? Facebooks academic research initiative to make its two billion users most intimate and personal data available through Social Science One for data mining by researchers all across the world poses unprecedented safety privacy and national security concerns that both Facebook and SSRC have largely remained silent about. For its part SSRC has either remained silent or declared that all questions about user privacy and security are merely to be determined" at a later date though earlier this year it conceded that concerns raised about its privacy measures were valid leading it to rethink its first major data release. While Social Science One will be making aggregated results available to researchers protected by differential privacy the initiatives research design represents a worst-case scenario for differential privacy suggesting it may quickly exhaust its privacy budget yet SSRC has remained silent on how it hopes to deal with this issue.