You've likely heard by now about Cambridge Analytica, the shadowy, Trump-affiliated data analysis firm that reportedly siphoned off information belonging to 50 million Facebook users, according to The Guardian and Observer, along with The New York Times. In the wake of the scandal over Facebook's privacy practices, users have become newly interested in the data that Facebook collects and retains about them. But while the social network makes it fairly simple to download everything it knows about you, it doesn't provide a roadmap for how to parse that data or figure out what it means. Facebook announced Wednesday, however, that in the coming weeks, it will expand the data it allows you to download to include likes, reactions, search history, and location history. The social network also plans to add an option for users to transfer the data to another service if they want.

Apple boss Tim Cook pulled no punches when he was asked about Facebook's ongoing privacy scandal. Cook was in Chicago on Wednesday to debut Apple's newest iPad and unveil a slew of education-focused apps. When asked what he would do if he were in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's shoes, Cook replied with a smirk: 'I wouldn't be in this situation.' In an interview with MSNBC and Recode on Wednesday, Tim Cook (pictured) was asked what he would do if he were in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes. He replied: 'I wouldn't be in this situation' Facebook continues to deal with the fallout from its massive data scandal, after it was revealed that 50 million members' data had been harvested without their knowledge.

Facebook will give people new ways of seeing and deleting the data it collects on its users, it has said. The latest development comes as the social network continues to try and stop the damage from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, through which it became clear that the site was collecting many of its users' most sensitive and personal information. Now it says it will add new features in the next few weeks that will change the site's terms of service and its data policy so that people can see how their data is being collected. It will also give people new ways of deleting what has been collected and stopping further information being harvested, it claimed. Those tools will allow people to delete data selectively, as well as removing their account entirely, Facebook's announcement appeared to suggest. "Some people want to delete things they've shared in the past, while others are just curious about the information Facebook has," it wrote.

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe are demanding to know more about the company's privacy practices after a whistleblower said consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to target U.S. and British voters in elections.

Chris Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower whose revelations about Facebook data being misused for political campaigning has wiped billions off the share price of the company in recent days and led to the FTC opening a fresh investigation, has suggested the scale of the data leak is substantially larger than has been reported so far. Giving evidence today, to a UK parliamentary select committee that's investigating the use of disinformation in political campaigning, Wylie said: "The 50 million number is what the media has felt safest to report -- because of the documentation that they can rely on -- but my recollection is that it was substantially higher than that. So my own view is it was much more than 50M." We've reached out to Facebook about Wylie's claim -- but at the time of writing the company had not provided a response. "There were several iterations of the Facebook harvesting project," Wylie also told the committee, fleshing out the process through which he says users' data was obtained by CA. "It first started as a very small pilot -- firstly to see, most simply, is this data matchable to an electoral register… We then scaled out slightly to make sure that [Cambridge University professor Alexsandr Kogan] could acquire data in the speed that he said he could [via a personality test app called thisisyourdigitallife deployed via Facebook's platform]. So the first real pilot of it was a sample of 10,000 people who joined the app -- that was in late May 2014. "That project went really well and that's when we signed a much larger contract with GSR [Kogan's company] in the first week of June… 2014.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is to testify before Congress over his social network's role in the harvesting millions of users' data without their knowledge. Zuckerberg turned down a similar request from British MPs to answer questions on the role of the data firm Cambridge Analytica in the US presidential election campaign. But the whistle-blower behind the scandal did agree to give evidence and, in doing so, revealed that the Brexit vote was also subject to manipulation by the firm.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) confirmed Monday that it is investigating Facebook's privacy practices following reports that the company allowed personal data to be extracted from users without expressed permission. The investigation was spurred by reports that Facebook allowed political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to gain access to the personal information of more than 50 million Facebook users and use that data to craft targeted political advertising campaigns. "The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook," Tom Pahl, Acting Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. "Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices." The FTC previously declined to comment on an investigation into Facebook.

In George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, the hero Winston Smith muses privately about the danger of letting his thoughts wander within range of a "telescreen" through which Big Brother monitors the citizens of Airstrip One. "The smallest thing could give you away," Smith thinks to himself as he works silently in front of one of the screens. "A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide." Orwell even invented a word for the offence that would be committed by Smith if he was to be caught in the act of wearing an improper expression. While the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal has revealed what is claimed to have been a deeply shocking bid to penetrate the thoughts and expressions of real people, the story still perhaps feels strangely remote to the majority of the UK's social media users.

When we were invited to write a retrospective article about our AAAI-99 paper on mutual bootstrapping (Riloff and Jones 1999), our first reaction was hesitation because, well, that algorithm seems old and clunky now. But upon reflection, it shaped a great deal of subsequent work on bootstrapped learning for natural language processing, both by ourselves and others. So our second reaction was enthusiasm, for the opportunity to think about the path from 1999 to 2017 and to share the lessons that we learned about bootstrapped learning along the way. This article begins with a brief history of related research that preceded and inspired the mutual bootstrapping work, to position it with respect to that period of time. We then describe the general ideas and approach behind the mutual bootstrapping algorithm. Next, we overview several types of research that have followed and shared similar themes: multi-view learning, bootstrapped lexicon induction, and bootstrapped pattern learning. Finally, we discuss some of the general lessons that we have learned about bootstrapping techniques for NLP to offer guidance to researchers and practitioners who may be interested in exploring these types of techniques in their own work.

Facebook's privacy practices are under investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission following a week of scandals and public outrage over the company's failure to protect the personal information of tens of millions of users. "The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook," said Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection in a statement on Monday noting that the investigation would include whether the company engaged in "unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers". Facebook's stock, which already took a big hit last week, slid as a result falling by as much as 6% at one point. "We remain strongly committed to protecting people's information," Facebook's deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, said in a statement. "We appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have." Facebook's privacy practices have come under fire after revelations in the Observer that Cambridge Analytica got data on Facebook users, including information on friends of people who had downloaded a psychological quiz app, even though those friends had not given explicit consent to sharing.