Facebook has shut down all accounts and access for New York University’s Ad Observatory project <https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/04/facebook_research_lockdown/>. This project was using a browser extension to garner information about ads shown to Facebook users without the cooperation of Facebook itself. However, the project <https://adobservatory.org/> tries to be fully transparent about what it is doing to volunteers who choose to install the extension, and as is common these days, the source code is available on GitHub. Part of Facebook’s excuse is that the extension is somehow scraping information from the website that is “not publicly viewable”. How such information is getting to the user’s browser is not explained. Facebook has its own alternative research platform, called “FORT”, that it makes available to selected researchers on a strictly controlled basis. One of the conditions is that Facebook is given pre-publication access to research papers in order to identify--and remove--information that it considers to be “confidential”. Naturally, this kind of thing rings alarm bells for researchers. Another group has published an open letter <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/08/05/facebooks-illusory-promise-of-transparency/> pointing out why this is not an acceptable alternative.