I am a software engineer, working with what’s called Big Data. Datasets are wonderful, exciting things. If you do this for a living there are few things better than getting your hands on a couple of hundred gigabytes of raw data. Its a toy. Its exciting. Its interesting. Its attractive.
You could ask why do I record the opening and closing times of my garage door and the voltage on my photovoltaics. Its because I can, and I like to trolley through datasets to see what I can find.
As for the benefits to FB, well first, they are only going to be a broker for this information. It will ultimately be sold to marketers or political campaigns. If the data is rubbish when it gets there, FB won’t get the blame. They just passed it on and took a cut of the profits.
But the part of the dataset which is unreliable may be of little interest to the consumers. Maybe they just want to know what hospital a given user goes to. For example @armozel uses hospital X in 2017. Two years later a local political candidate sends out a targeted advertisement saying “vote for me to save hospital X”.
That sort of thing.
