It has been a rough few weeks for Facebook since the Observer reported the Cambridge Analytica data breach. The scandal revealed how the political consulting firm might have raked up the personal information of at least 87 million Facebook users in order to influence them with tailored political ads, sent the social network's stocks into a tailspin, triggered the #DeleteFacebook movement – and regaled the planet with the cringefest that was CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before the US Senate. But if Facebook's reputation has seen better days, one of the company's most valuable assets has come out of the kerfuffle practically unscathed. Instagram, the photo-sharing platform Facebook acquired in 2012 for $715m, has not yet come up in the debate over Facebook's cavalier attitude to user data protection, despite being of a piece with the longer-running social network (and being headquartered just a few blocks from Facebook's Menlo Park campus in California). Prominent members of the #DeleteFacebook campaign, such as SpaceX's Elon Musk, singer Cher, and Playboy magazine, are still pretty much present and active on Instagram.

Our client hosts a large annual conference of 20,000 technical decision makers, IT professionals, and software developers from around the world. The conference includes over 700 sessions across multiple days that range from product demos to insights from industry leaders. Selected sessions from the annual event are repeated in smaller events in cities around the world. Each conference event generates a lot of feedback from attendees. The conference organizers analyze the feedback to determine whether each day was a success.

For several years, the state of Utah was collecting statistics and feedback on public opinion, but the state didn't really have a plan for what to do with the data. Recently, it decided to use machine learning tools to analyze health, transportation, air quality and geo-based Twitter information to perform sentiment analysis before, during and after Utah's winter inversions and air quality spikes. Utah CIO Michael Hussey explained how the state went about it at the 2018 National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Midyear Conference in Baltimore on Tuesday. Winter inversions in Utah occur when the usual atmospheric conditions become inverted. A dense layer of cold air becomes trapped under a layer of warm air, essentially sealing pollutants closer to the ground.

Facebook beat Wall Street revenue projections and announced that its user numbers were in line with estimates in the wake of a user data privacy scandal. Up to 87m users saw their data end up in the possession of political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Facebook has since been scrambling to mollify angry politicians and reassure users that it will safeguard their personal information. Amid that turmoil, observers were keenly watching the company's user figures to assess the potential damage and see if the scandal would suppress Facebook's long-term growth. Its North American user numbers were already flagging at the end of 2017, and since then a number of users have vowed to quit the platform, among them some prominent technology executives, as the #DeleteFacebook movement gained steam.

Two weeks ago I logged into good old Facebook dot com to discover I was one of the 311,127 Australians – and one of about 87 million people worldwide – who had their personal data harvested by Cambridge Analytica sometime around 2013-15. I was a small and unwitting cog in a vast, beguiling narrative of unfurling geopolitical upheaval encompassing the Trump presidency, Russian interference and Brexit. Here's what Facebook told me. I was not one of the 270,000-odd people who signed up to the now infamous This is Your Digital Life survey app but one of my friends was. As a result, Facebook "probably" shared my public profile, page likes, my date of birth and the city I lived in.

A group of the world's leading internet academics say Facebook's decision to tighten access to user data in reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal will actually hamper genuine research and oversight of the platform. An open letter, signed by 27 researchers and published on Wednesday, said while the privacy changes might generate positive publicity for Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, they were "likely to compound the real problem, further diminishing transparency and opportunities for independent oversight". On 4 April, Facebook announced it would make changes to protect the privacy of users, including restricting access to application program interfaces used by third parties to access data. "The net effect of the new API restrictions is to lock out third parties and consolidate Facebook's position as the main analytics and advertising broker," the open letter says. "Contrary to popular belief, these changes are as much about strengthening Facebook's business model of data control as they are about actually improving data privacy for users."

He later shared the information with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump's 2016 electionl campaign. Cambridge Analytica has acknowledged it licensed data from Mr. Kogan but said it wasn't used in the U.S. presidential race Clients of Cambridge Analytica have said the company had trouble delivering on its claims that its personality-profiling would help politicians win votes. Mr. Kogan said the data turned out to be of zero value to the company, and his app was less effective at targeting consumers than Facebook's traditional advertising. "The idea that this data is accurate, I would say, is scientifically ridiculous," he told a committee of U.K. lawmakers investigating fake news. "The project, quite frankly, if the goal is microtargeting using Facebook ads, makes no sense. It's not what you would do."

LONDON – Cambridge Analytica unleashed its counterattack against claims that it misused data from millions of Facebook accounts, saying Tuesday it is the victim of misunderstandings and inaccurate reporting that portrays the company as the evil villain in a James Bond movie. Clarence Mitchell, a high-profile publicist recently hired to represent the company, held Cambridge Analytica's first news conference since allegations surfaced that the Facebook data helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica's parent, also claims that the company has links to the successful campaign to take Britain out of the European Union. "The company has been portrayed in some quarters as almost some Bond villain," Mitchell said. "Cambridge Analytica is no Bond villain."

There is a huge spectrum of opinion on the value of the Facebook data that Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan gave to Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL. Dr Kogan told a parliamentary committee: "Given what we know now, nothing, literally nothing - the idea that this data is accurate I would say is scientifically ridiculous." On the other hand, there have been suggestions this sort of data will allow computers to gain a profound understanding of people and their preferences. In a news conference on Tuesday, Cambridge Analytica's spokesman said the company had also found Dr Kogan's data set to be "virtually useless". The orthodox view among data scientists is that the use of social media data to target adverts on Facebook is in its infancy and not yet hugely effective - but Dr Kogan is going further than that, saying that it was completely without value.

Facebook is in "crisis" over its data abuse scandal, according to the academic at the heart of it. The social network is still struggling to deal with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arose amid allegations about the misuse of people's most personal data. That scandal – which has been linked to both the Brexit and Trump campaigns – has quickly become about Facebook more generally. The company has been forced to respond to criticisms of its business practises by posting a series of articles online, in which it defends itself in a variety of different ways. It has been forced to admit that it gathers ad data by tracking people around the web, for instance, and has claimed that people are wrong to suggest that users are the product in Facebook's services.