Thanks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in March, Facebook decided to clean house by making it easy for people to check their privacy settings and by claiming that they would do an audit on apps that have access to Facebook data.
Facebook had a two phase approach to this: A comprehensive review to identify every app that has access to Facebook data and the second phase involved conducing interview and making requests for information if they had concerns.
The company had a lot of experts working hard to investigate this apps and the results are surprising. Facebook says that they have investigated thousands of apps and around 200 were suspended.
200 apps is a lot of apps to be honest and it is kind of unfortunate it had to take a huge scandal like the Cambridge Analytica one to galvanize Facebook to make these moves. These suspended apps will undergo a ‘thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data’ as explained by Facebook.
In the event the suspended app is found to have misused the data it accessed from Facebook, the company says that they will ban it and notify people here. Just like how they did with Cambridge Analytica, this website will show people if them or their friends installed an app that misused data before the year 2015.
It is great that Facebook is making all the moves to prevent a scandal of Cambridge Analytica’s magnitude from happening again. That scandal led to $132 billion being wiped off Facebook’s market capitalization, although they have since recuperated.
