Facebook suspends 200 apps post Cambridge Analytica scandal
What's the story
Facebook has suspended 200 potentially problematic third-party apps from the platform. The company suspects these apps to have misused the user information they had access to and is investigating the same. Facebook didn't name the suspended apps but did say that they are among the thousands of apps that the company has examined so far in an internal data abuse investigation of app developers.
Context
Facebook reviewing thousands of apps by its own estimation
The probe comes in the wake of the recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personal information of 87 million users was collected without consent to allegedly manipulate voters ahead of the 2016 US Presidential elections. The data was collected through a third-party personality quiz app. To avoid such scandals in the future, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had promised an audit of all third-party apps.
Going Forward
Facebook will tell users if they installed a dishonest app
Now Facebook will further investigate the suspended apps via interviews, requests for information and also on-site inspections to uncover if they have collected any user data and in what capacity. Any app that refuses to comply with the audit will automatically be banned from Facebook. "Where we find evidence that apps did misuse data, we will ban them and notify people," the company said.
Details
Facebook estimates the investigation to cost it "many million dollars"
The investigation process has two phases. First, Facebook identifies apps that had access to "large amounts of data" before 2015, because that's when the company updated its policies to make data collection difficult for third-party apps. Second, for all concerned apps, Facebook conducts interviews and asks them detailed information about their data usage. The company didn't specify how long the review process would take.