Facebook Reviews Thousands of Apps in its Platform

Facebook announced that it investigated thousands of apps with access to the company’s user data. Hence, the social network suspended 200 of them ‘pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data.’

Ime Archibong, Facebook’s VP of product partnerships, said in a post that the company has looked into the activity of thousands of apps, stating that the investigation process has two phases.

First, Facebook identifies apps that had access to ‘large amounts of data’, an example of this is Cambridge Analytica. Lastly, the social network site conducts interviews and asks for detailed information about the app and its data usage.

Facebook will also perform audits that may include on-site inspections.

Facebook wrote in a blog post on Monday, “Where we find evidence that these or other apps did misuse data, we will ban them and notify people via this website.”

The special website is the same site used to alert people if their data was shared with Cambridge Analytica.

As with most of its announcements in the past scandal-ridden months, Facebook says there is “a lot more work to be done.”

One, if not the most, infamous scandal is the app’s user data breach on Cambridge Analytica. Users play the personality quiz ‘this is your digital life’, where 87 million users’ data had been collected. There were claims that the data was sold to Cambridge Analytica used to psychologically profile voters for the 2016 US election and EU referendum.

RELATED: Cambridge Analytica Announces Closure, Files for Bankruptcy

Three Million Facebook Users’ Data Exposed

According to a report, three million users who took a personality quiz on Facebook was published on a poorly protected website, the website might have been accessed by unauthorized parties.

In addition, the data contained Facebook users’ answers to a personality trait test. It includes users’ age, gender, and relationship status; for 150,000 people, it even contained their status updates.

The data were supposed to be accessible only to approved researchers. However, it is found that a username and password that granted access to the data could be found ‘in less than a minute’ with an online search. This enabled anyone to download the trove of personal information.

A psychology test ‘MyPersonality’ collected the users’ data. It is somehow similar to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, only the latter had 87 million, and the former had collected 3 million user data.

Facebook said that the app is currently under investigation. The social networking site added that if the app and developers ‘refuses to cooperate or fails the audit’, it would be banned.

MyPersonality is now included on the 200 apps Facebook has suspended due to misuse of user data.

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