In a statement to Neowin, Mozilla has called out Facebook for its counterintuitive approach to research, saying that the NYU Ad Observatory did not deserve to be banned from the platform.
A few hours ago, Facebook announced that it is blocking platform access for the New York University (NYU) Ad Observatory, which was studying the impact of political ads on social media. The company claimed that the reason for the ban is that the researchers built a browser extension that breached user privacy and collected personal data without their consent. Despite Facebook offering data in a privacy-protective manner and warning the NYU Ad Observatory multiple times, the researchers continued using their extension for unauthorized data scraping.
