The Social Network Becomes a Social Science Subject

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Differential Privacy

#News(Security) [ via IoTGroup ]

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Last weekend I attended an event called Social Science Foo Camp, an “unconference” where attendees spontaneously schedule discussion sessions to create a lively agenda.
One of the more interesting sessions I attended concerned a project called data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://socialscience.one/”}’ href=”https://socialscience.one/” rel=”nofollow noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Social Science One.
Social Science One is an effort to get the Holy Grail of data sets into the hands of private researchers.
That Holy Grail is Facebook data.
In the Foo Camp session, Stanford Law School’s Nate Persily, cohead of Social Science One, said that after 20 months of negotiations, Facebook was finally releasing the data to researchers.
(The researchers had thought all of that would be settled in two months.) A Facebook data scientist who worked on the team dedicated to this project beamed in confirmation.
The information centers on URLs shared by Facebook’s billions of users—specifically, the 38 million of these that were shared more than 100 times on Facebook between January 1, 2017, and July 31, 2019.
“This dataset enables social scientists to study some of the most important questions of our time about the effects of social media on democracy and elections with information to which they have never before had access,” reads the Social Science One press release.
The reason it took so long is that Facebook, quite understandably, wanted to protect the privacy of its users.
Simply aggregating the information so that no individual’s activity can be identified wasn’t enough for Facebook, which insisted on also encoding the data via a technology called differential privacy.

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