Gary King benefited from perfect timing in selling Facebook on the idea of sharing a treasure trove of its data with academics. But now, the clock is working against efforts by King and others to keep the innovative project—which aims to better understand how information spread on Facebook influences elections and political institutions around the world—from falling apart. The key sticking point: protecting the privacy of Facebook users.

In March 2018, King, a quantitative social scientist at Harvard University, made a visit to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The media had just broken the news that a U.K. firm, Cambridge Analytica, had been selling voter profiles to candidates based on personal information provided unwittingly by millions of Facebook users. The resulting scandal was a sobering lesson for Facebook on how not to share its data with outsiders.

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The call sent King and Nate Persily, a law professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, into overdrive on their plan to stand up Social Science One, a nonprofit entity that would be the online site for researchers to access any data that Facebook released. Its first project would give researchers a look at how Facebook’s 2 billion users had shared websites discussing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as democratic institutions around the world.