“There has never been a time when so much data existed about human behavior,” begins a Chronicle of Higher Education article about the academic use of Facebook’s data. “What many of us buy, sell, like, dislike, read, and tell our friends is recorded on the internet thanks to sites like Facebook. To social scientists, the company is sitting on a gold mine… [A] commission, would be trained on the company’s policies and would theoretically know why some information can be shared and some can’t, presumably because of legal proceedings or certain privacy laws. The scholars on the commission would not be able to do their own research or share the company’s secrets, but they would solicit proposals from others and serve as a filter for the data, meting it out to the researchers as deemed appropriate.”

The Pacific Standard also has an article about Facebook releasing its data to social scientists. This is a very interesting and potentially powerful development!