SpacePuppy wrote:

https://www.maps.org/news/media/7054-press-release-mercer-family-foundation-grants-www.-million-to-maps-for-ptsd-research-in-veterans

This is interesting, but I don't know what horse they have in the race. Who holds the patent to MDMA? Anybody? Mayhaps they will only allow certain therapists (read: healthcare corporations) with very expensive licenses (read: Govt kickbacks and the further elimination of individual healthcare providers) to perform the therapy.

As for Cambridge Analytics: Those reporters act like getting any information "from Facebook" is difficult. The Facebook Graph API makes it very easy to ingest whole histories of posts, conversations, images, etc. into full text processors, even image analysis software. I just read a masters program thesis on analyzing images of a poster over time to determine the amount of tanning they do, in order to target melanoma warnings (and sunscreen marketing). All using public posts. If you can get a few people to play your free game and invite their friends, you can harvest even more "friends only" data. Look for a few pro/con political sentiments and you can easily bucket people into all kinds of political pigeon holes.

I've used the Graph to build a targeted list of local users for a local HVAC place, trolling for influential people with many friends in order to target market a referral program. Once they friend the HVAC business they get a discount and we harvest their friends list. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. I don't do that any more, they didn't want to pay much, but it's steady work for people that want it.