Facebook suspends 200 apps in data-misuse investigation
Facebook has suspended about 200 apps that had access to large amounts of user data four years ago, part of its internal investigation in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the investigation in March several days after the social network said the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and its parent company had failed to delete personal data belonging to 87 million Facebook users that it had improperly obtained.
Since then, Zuckerberg testified in Congress about the crisis, and Cambridge Analytica has shut down. During his testimony, Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would investigate any other apps that had access to massive amounts of user data — as Cambridge Analytica did — prior to 2014 when the social site reduced the amount of data accessible by Facebookconnected apps.
That investigation is ongoing and, so far, as part of the app audit, “thousands of apps have been investigated and around 200 have been suspended — pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data,” Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of product partnerships for Facebook, said in a post on Facebook’s website.
With any apps that raise concerns, Facebook will conduct interviews, seek information about the app and data it accessed and “perform audits that may include on-site inspections,” Archibong said.
Should Facebook find any apps that did misuse data, they will be banned and users will be told on Facebook’s site, where users can tell whether Cambridge Analytica had access to their data. Facebook would not say what efforts it had made to retrieve or delete any data an app was found to have obtained improperly.
Facebook would not name the apps on suspension, but one was a personality quiz called myPersonality, according to the U.K. magazine New Scientist, which reported Monday that Facebook had suspended the app April 7. University of Cambridge researchers distributed data on more than 3 million Facebook users to other researchers through a website with insufficient security protections, the magazine reported.
A University of Cambridge researcher, Alexsandr Kogan, was listed as a collaborator on the myPersonality app until 2014, New Scientist reported.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal arose from another psychology app, created by Kogan, called This is Your Digital Life, which was downloaded four years ago by some 300,000 Facebook users. The app not only collected data on users but also their Facebook friends. That larger data set, which included data on 87 million users, was passed onto Cambridge Analytica, against Facebook’s policies, according to Facebook.
Facebook revealed the data-misuse incident just before The New York Times and the U.K.’s Observer published reports about the incursion. Cambridge Analytica, which worked on President Trump’s campaign, has denied using the Facebook data on behalf of the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.