https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/05/23/gdprs-massive-research-... [excerpt] Many of the research outputs of Social Science One that will be published in academic journals will directly benefit Facebook’s own commercial interests and effectively perform commercially beneficial research in proxy. Asked how this is handled under GDPR, especially given the privacy legacy of “research” like that of Cambridge Analytica, the Commission again emphasized that GDPR applies to research but also affords numerous exemptions for research. Stepping back, Social Science One will enable researchers from all across the world, including those whose labs are primarily funded by adversarial governments engaged in misinformation operations against the EU, to freely mine the most intimate personal and private EU citizen data. That data may eventually include medical records, financial information, intimate photographs, communications and information regarding minors, highly sensitive vulnerable population membership and other enormously sensitive information shared over social channels EU citizens thought were private. EU citizens are prohibited from opting out of this research and both Facebook and the initiative have strangely declined to guarantee that content and accounts deleted by users will not be preserved for permanent researcher access. Even active manipulation and intervention in EU elections has not been ruled out. Moreover, despite its much-vaunted privacy safeguards, those protections may be rapidly exhausted due to the initiative’s research design, while other Facebook initiatives that use similar privacy protections acknowledge that they still pose a privacy and safety risk and thus require a layer of professional gatekeepers that are not part of the Social Science One model. All of this would appear to be permissible under GDPR and in fact the entire initiative may even find itself exempt from any GDPR regulation at all. This raises the question of just what benefit GDPR actually provides to the citizens of the European Union when their right to digital privacy, the protection of their data and the freedom to not be mined and manipulated seems little changed from the pre-GDPR era. -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast -------------------------------------------------------------- -