Alexandre Hannud Abdo

That's a really good point for discussion.

Ain't this is basically fighting for the right to continue to use unethically collected data for research?

On a much milder - yet much larger - scale, ain't it as if data from experiments on war prisioners was being shut down, and the research community was crying out about how bad it is to lose that data instead of pointing to the fact that war prisoners are being used for experiments?

Even if having the data could help us understand the consequences of these experiments, and even if that might eventually help avoid the worst of it, doesn't that still represent an approach where it is a priori OK to violate the prisoner's human rights?

Perhaps not, perhaps we still need more research to support the idea that we should not have one single entity that collects, distributes, analyses, decides on, auctions and manipulates the identity and information on the social - personal and political - lives of billions of people.

But perhaps most of this kind of research is just piggybacking on the ease to massively violate human rights in order to build an academic career and feel good by posing as a critic. Let alone the fact that most "critical" research about Facebook is actually doing the job for their marketing deparment, by "proving" to advertisers its effectiveness.

Facing that, and not needeing further proof that an oligopoly of information and identity platforms is not suitable for democracy, I'd rather focus my energy elsewhere.

That researchers and universities should be researching and promoting descentralized information and identity platforms [1, 2, 3]; and figuring out how to do on-line social research under ethical conditions.

Abraços,
l
e
.~´