Facebook is looking into a security report that reveals Facebook user data can be snatched by JavaScript trackers if they're planted in websites that let users log in with their Facebook credentials. Not just their name and email address, either: The exploit catches age range, gender, locale and possibly a profile photo too, depending on how much access the user allowed said website. Once someone logs in, any third-party JavaScript can supposedly retrieve their info at will. The report, by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy website Freedom to Tinker, listed 431 of the top one million sites (by Alexa rank) that have the shady scripts embedded. The list included cloud database provider MongoDB until TechCrunch brought the issue to their attention, after which they allegedly shut down the abusive script.

The committee said it had called Aleksandr Kogan from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge to discuss his relationship with Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political firm also accused of improperly accessing data.

Brittney Kaiser, a former employee for Cambridge Analytica -- who left the company in January and is today giving evidence in front of a UK parliament committee that's investigating online misinformation -- has suggested that data on far more Facebook users may have found its way into the consultancy's hands than the up to 87M people Facebook has so far suggested had personal data compromised as a result of a personality quiz app running on its platform which was developed by an academic working with CA. Another former CA employee, Chris Wylie, previously told the committee the company worked with professor Aleksandr Kogan to gather Facebook users' data -- via his thisisyourdigitallife quiz app -- because Kogan had agreed to work on gathering and processing the data first, instead of negotiating commercial terms up front. CA's intent was to use Facebookers' data for political microtargeting, according to evidence provided by Wylie. I should emphasise that the Kogan/GSR datasets and questionnaires were not the only Facebook-connected questionnaires and datasets which Cambridge Analytica used. I am aware in a general sense of a wide range of surveys which were done by CA or its partners, usually with a Facebook login – for example, the "sex compass" quiz.

Controversial data mining company collected information on at least 87 million Facebook users. LONDON -- Cambridge Analytica created its own Facebook quizzes and questionnaires to collect reams of data on users using the social networking giant, according to a former senior official at the data mining company. Brittany Kaiser, the former director of program development at Cambridge Analytica, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that the company, which is at the center of a broader Facebook data scandal, widely used such practices, including a "sex compass" quiz, to garner insight on people's online habits. These data-collection strategies made it highly likely that more people's Facebook data had been collected without their knowledge than previously thought, according to Kaiser. Cambridge Analytica is already accused of using a third-party app created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, to collect online information on up to 87 million Facebook users.

Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, testified today in front of a UK committee that's investigating the misuse of Facebook users' personal data. Kaiser claimed in her spoken and written testimony that Cambridge Analytica used other quizzes, such as the "'sex compass' quiz," to gather users' data. Kaiser did not have information on the specific quizzes that Cambridge Analytica used, but her statement makes clear that "This Is Your Digital Life" was not the only quiz that the company utilized to scrape Facebook data. Her written statement claims that Cambridge Analytica was not up front with Facebook in regard to the data it had. For example, she notes that Cambridge Analytica data scientists appeared to be using Facebook data two months after the company told Facebook that said data had been deleted.

Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana criticized Facebook's user agreement during Mark Zuckerberg's Senate hearing. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., listens to testimony during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Dec. 6, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer, Getty Images) WASHINGTON – Senators introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday that would give Americans greater power to protect their online privacy. The day before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress about the misuse of user data on the social media site. "The data breach at Facebook showed the world that the digital promised land is not all milk and honey," said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. "I don't want to regulate Facebook half to death, but there are things that need to be changed."

We recently announced a new version of Excel Add-in which lets you perform state-of-the-art text analysis capabilities from the comforts of your spreadsheets without writing a single line of code. The add-in has been received very well by users working across different industry verticals like Market Research, Software, Consumer Goods, Education, etc. solving a variety of use-cases. Sentiment analysis has been the most used function of our Excel add-in closely followed by Emotion detection. Many of our users use sentiment analysis in Excel to quickly and accurately analyze the responses of their open-ended surveys, online chatter around their product/service or to analyze product reviews from e-commerce sites. In this blog post, we will discuss how to use the function Sentiment Analysis in Excel Add-in to do text analytics for any type of content.

Facebook pays millions of dollars every year to researchers and bug hunters to stamp out security holes in its products and infrastructure, but following Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company today launched a bounty program to reward users for reporting "data abuse" on its platform. The move comes as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before Congress this week amid scrutiny over the data sharing controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm that obtained and misused data on potentially 87 million of its users. Through its new "Data Abuse Bounty" program, Facebook would ask users to help the social media giant find app developers misusing data, Facebook announced Tuesday. Similar to its existing bug bounty program, the Data Abuse Bounty program will reward a sum of money to anyone who reports valid events of data collection that violate Facebook's revamped data policies. "This program is complementary to our existing bug bounty program in that it'follows the data' even if the root cause isn't a security flaw in Facebook's code," the company explains.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has endured a gruelling five-hour hearing before the US House of Representatives, facing tough questions about how the site protects user data, whether it is biased against certain users – and what, exactly, it is. The second day of questioning before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce proved more taxing for the 33-year-old than his testimony before two Senate committees on Tuesday. Representatives shot rapid-fire questions at the entrepreneur, and even interrupted his answers at several points. "While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured," Representative Greg Walden said at the opening of the hearing on Wednesday. "I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things."

The web contains countless semi-structured websites, which can be a rich source of information for populating knowledge bases. Existing methods for extracting relations from the DOM trees of semi-structured webpages can achieve high precision and recall only when manual annotations for each website are available. Although there have been efforts to learn extractors from automatically-generated labels, these methods are not sufficiently robust to succeed in settings with complex schemas and information-rich websites. In this paper we present a new method for automatic extraction from semi-structured websites based on distant supervision. We automatically generate training labels by aligning an existing knowledge base with a web page and leveraging the unique structural characteristics of semi-structured websites. We then train a classifier based on the potentially noisy and incomplete labels to predict new relation instances. Our method can compete with annotation-based techniques in the literature in terms of extraction quality. A large-scale experiment on over 400,000 pages from dozens of multi-lingual long-tail websites harvested 1.25 million facts at a precision of 90%.