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Facebook To Share Private Data With Politico

tomhudson writes "AllThingsD is reporting that Facebook has agreed to share users' private data with Politico. Quoting: 'Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users' private status messages and comments. Every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate's name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool.' Yes, they claim it will be anonymized, but we've seen that doesn't really work in real life."

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  1. Re:Google does the same by TechGuys · · Score: -1, Troll

    Google is taking data that users are providing them, and doing statistical analysis on that data. There's no issue with this, because it's not leaving Google.

    Facebook is taking data that users are providing them, and sending it off to a third party to do statistical analysis on it. This is a terrible invasion of privacy, because Facebook users never intended for their private data to be shipped off to other companies.

    If you can't see the difference here than you're either dumb or an anti-Google shill.

    No, that's only what the summary is claiming. How unsurprising that it is wrong. Read the announcement by Facebook

    Facebook will compile mentions of the candidates in U.S. users' posts and comments as well as assess positive and negative sentiments expressed about them. Facebookâ(TM)s data team will use automated software tools frequently used by researchers to infer sentiment from text.