A bit of an odd one for me. Is the FTC in the business of deciding what research is "good faith" and "in the "public interest"? Could a company rely on such designation from them in the future when making decisions?

It's a government commission. That's it's entire purpose.

"The FTC is a bipartisan federal agency with a unique dual mission to protect consumers and promote competition."

Thank you - I did know that they have their own research on economics (in relation to antitrust, for example) but didn't realize they are "endorsing" (can't find a better word) outside research.

Just to note: Bipartisan does not mean apolitical. It just means it is represented by the two dominant parties.

Oh come on, the difference in this case is pretty obvious for anyone not working in advertising.

Also, more formally: CA's research was violating privacy laws because it was gathering personal data from Facebook's users without their consent.

This is not the case here. Individual users had to explicitly install a particular browser extension to participate in the research.

> CA's research was violating privacy laws because it was gathering personal data from Facebook's users without their consent.

It actually gathered data from fb users with explicit consent (a login with FB dialog along with a permissions dialog box). The app then scraped the public information of that user's friend's list.

If you replace "friends list" with "ads list", it seems to have pretty strong similarities to what's happening here.

Were the users actually aware of that permissions dialog box?

Does good faith research in the public interest justify collecting any data through any means and storing it in any way you like ? On paper fb seems ridiculous but I don’t want to assume that said researchers collected and stored data appropriately. Those skills aren’t necessarily available to them easily