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Stop us if you've heard this one before: Facebook gives your data to a research group...

caption: Academic researchers will soon have access to a vast amount of Facebook's user data.
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Academic researchers will soon have access to a vast amount of Facebook's user data.
Flickr Photo/Andrew Feinberg (CC BY 2.0)/https://flic.kr/p/4xvBtj

Facebook is sharing its user data with an external research group, which will mine it for details about how people use the site.

Sound familiar?

The group isn't Cambridge Analytica, but this collaboration is a new one for Facebook. Following the data mining scandal, the company began working with a pair of academics to devise a system allowing researchers access to a pedabyte of information.

The first request for proposals just went out, and Karen Weise from Bloomberg Tech joined Ross Reynolds in studio to explain how the research project will work.

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