Facebook’s Restrictions on User Data Cast a Long Shadow

The Wall Street Journal - Cites research by Benjamin Crosier, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry, in an article about how Facebook's restrictions on its user data are rippling through academia, business and presidential politics. Crosier was building an app to look for links between social-media activity and drug addiction, and Facebook's restrictions on data halted his research. Crosier is petitioning the company to get some of that data back and hopes to salvage his project by asking Facebook for access to eight types of data, including photos in which a user is tagged. He hopes to reconstruct a person's friend network by seeing who they socialize with through their photos. Dr. Crosier says he won't be able to see the images themselves, just that a user was tagged and by whom.  (Picked up by NASDAQ, Morningstar Advisor, and MSN.)