I think a better summary would by "MIT professor collects 90,000 hours of video of his son's first words, gets tenure based on that, does nothing with the data. With tenure safe in hand, leaves his students in a lurch as he heads off to do a start-up."
It's a great corpus he collected. Wish he either had a longer attention span, or at least bothered to share the data.
I had a similar reaction. I think it speaks to the time, that some of the greatest minds of our generation are 'seizing the opportunity' of a startup to develop social analytics around the 'jersey shore'. I can't help to think the great linguistic scholars (ex. his fellow MIT faculty member, Chomsky) doing the same things in the 50's. Can you image the loss to humanity if each one, after giving a TED talk, abondons his research in their 30's or 40's to make an advertising platform? This made me sad.
I think it's not that bad he didn't use the data very much himself, as the research could probably not be considered very objective. Didn't he mention he shared the data at least with his research group? Hopefully they'll develop some method to preserve this family's privacy and share the data further.
This case is a bit tricky due to privacy concerns, though; it contains raw audio/video of years of his personal life, which even most open-data mandates wouldn't require sharing, at least not in original form.
It's a great corpus he collected. Wish he either had a longer attention span, or at least bothered to share the data.