Social Media Data Breaches: Serious or Just a “Scrape”?

In August, Facebook suspended the accounts of NYU researchers who were investigating political ads on the social media platform. Facebook stated that the researchers were “gathered data by creating a browser extension that was programmed to evade our detection systems and scrape data such as usernames, ads, links to user profiles”. But the discussions and arguments around scraping does not end there, as there are endless questions on its legality, and the fact that big companies use this BUT don’t want it used against them.