With user numbers expected to hit the 1 billion mark in August, Facebook undoubtedly represents a goldmine for social scientists interested in data on people’s preferences and behaviors. But because of the social site’s privacy policies, getting access to the petabytes (1,000s of terabytes) of data is nearly impossible unless researchers are employees of Facebook. As a result, the findings and methods of papers published by Facebook scientists have gone unchecked due to lack of access to the raw data.
However, the company is exploring various scenarios that would allow third-party access to such data, according to Nature. For example, after the publication of a paper, interested scholars could travel to Facebook’s headquarters and have access to the aggregated data only, stripped of all personally identifiable information.
“We want to participate in the scientific process and we believe that there should be a way to have other researchers validate...
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