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.

More and more key players in the tech industry are voicing their concerns over the use of personal data following Facebook's massive Cambridge Analytica scandal. Executives from Apple Inc and IBM Corp have called for more oversight on how personal data is used following the consultancy firm's improper use of data, which affected more than 50 million Facebook users. Speaking at the three-day China Development Forum in Beijing, Apple chief Tim Cook said'well-crafted' regulation was required, while IBM Corp chief Virginia Rometty said users should have more agency over their own data. Executives from Apple Inc and IBM Corp have called for more oversight on how personal data is used following the Facebook Inc breach that saw roughly 50 million users' data misused by consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has come under intense scrutiny from users, lawmakers and investors following allegations from a whistleblower that it allowed British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to improperly use data and build voter profiles that were later used to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016. U.S. lawmakers on Friday officially requested that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg explain at a congressional hearing how user's data was released to the consultancy.

Last week, reports surfaced that the FTC was opening an investigation into Facebook regarding Cambridge Analytica's use of its data. The agency has now confirmed that it is indeed investigating the social media giant. "The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook," the FTC said in a statement. "Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices." Just over a week ago, a number of reports detailed how Cambridge Analytica obtained Facebook profile information on over 50 million Facebook users through a researcher that collected the data with an app.

Political pressure on Facebook continued to intensify as a key Senator invited CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and a regulatory agency confirmed it had launched an investigation. The scrutiny stems from revelations that a political consultancy employed by Donald Trump's presidential campaign harvested some 50 million Facebook users' worth of data via a survey app. As Facebook executives have scrambled to reassure users their personal information remains protected, elected officials have demanded Mr Zuckerberg himself appear before Congress. That push gained momentum with the embrace of Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. Paralleling the augmented attention from Congress, the Federal Trade Commission confirmed it had opened an investigation into Facebook's privacy and data security practices.