Facebook Suspends CubeYou Amid Data Scandal; NASA Employs Machine Learning to Hunt Distant Planets

Facebook has suspended the data‑analysis firm CubeYou after a scandal involving the misuse of personal information belonging to millions of users. CubeYou collected data from personality quizzes and shared it for marketing purposes. Facebook Vice President IME Archibong said the company’s apps will be removed from the platform if they do not comply with Facebook’s review. The move follows Facebook’s earlier suspension of the Canadian advertising and analytics firm AggregateIQ and reflects growing pressure from privacy advocates and regulators.

In a separate scientific development, NASA has launched a crowdsourcing project that invites volunteers to examine telescope images for signs of debris disks around stars—key indicators of exoplanets. Researchers at MIT have trained a machine‑learning system on the results of this project to automatically scan the nearly 750 million sources gathered by the Wide‑field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). In tests, the AI agreed with human classifications 97 % of the time and identified 367 previously unexamined objects that are promising candidates for further exoplanet study.