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Forget 'Russian' FaceApp - Facebook And Social Science One Are The Real Russian Data Danger

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For all the concern and calls for FBI investigations over FaceApp’s Russian provenance, it is worth remembering that Facebook’s vaunted academic research initiative, its collaboration with SSRC known as Social Science One, will be making the personal intimate data of Facebook’s 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?

Facebook’s 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 initiative’s 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.

Yet the real issue is how Social Science One intends to prevent bad actors from exploiting this unprecedentedly rich insight into the intimate lives of Facebook's users.

When asked last year about whether Social Science One would permit researchers with direct ties to government intelligence and military agencies, including those whose primary work is for government intelligence services, SSRC responded that this was “to be determined” rather than issuing a ban on such work. While researchers whose proposals are accepted by Social Science One will have their use of the data funded by independent foundations, researchers whose primary body of work is directly funded and directed by government intelligence services pose a particularly unique security and privacy risk.

Making this risk worse, SSRC declined to rule out allowing researchers to actively intervene and interfere in the live elections of other countries. Asked whether researchers in one country could propose to actively modify Facebook’s algorithms and interfaces in an attempt to change the vote outcome of a democratic election in a different country, SSRC refused to rule the scenario out, offering again that active intervention was not part of its first call for proposals, but that it was not preemptively ruling it out.

In short, Russian university researchers whose labs are directly funded and directed by the Russian intelligence services could apply to Social Science One to mine the private data of Facebook’s American users in order to fine-tune their future misinformation campaigns. In future, they would not need to buy ads to run those misinformation campaigns, they could simply submit a proposal directly to Social Science One to modify Facebook’s algorithms and interfaces for its US users to directly change the electoral outcome of a close presidential election.

This raises the question of whether Facebook would seek to block Social Science One proposals by researchers at Russian universities whose primary funding was from the Russian intelligence services and whose research proposal appeared to be designed to gather operational information for a future Russian government misinformation campaign directed at the United States. Asked this question last year, a Facebook spokesperson emphasized that Social Science One’s use of aggregation and differential privacy prevented individual user’s data from being viewable, but remained silent when asked whether the company would formally commit to banning such Russian researchers whose primarily work was on behalf of the Russian intelligence services from applying to Social Science One.

Putting this all together, for all of the uproar and congressional interest in FaceApp’s Russian provenance, if the Russian government wished to fine-tune its next foreign influence campaign, it could simply have one of the university researchers it funds submit a proposal to Social Science One to gather the necessary information. Neither SSRC nor Facebook itself would commit to banning such researchers from its program, nor would SSRC commit to banning active intervention in live elections in other countries, including by such researchers.

In the end, instead of focusing all of our attention on random apps whose developers just happen to be Russian, perhaps we should take a closer look at how the biggest social media companies are in the process of opening their vaults to those very same Russians.