Facebook Has Suspended Around 200 Apps That Could Have Misused Your Data

The roughly 200 suspended apps will now be subjected to a thorough investigation into whether they misused user data.

Now, Facebook users can check if Cambridge Analytica accessed their data on a page created by Facebook.

The company reportedly poured through thousands of apps and targeted about 200 for more scrutiny. The exact scale of user information that’s been taken and shared by Facebook app devlopers since the platform’s inception-made possible by leaky and/or poorly enforced app developer policies-may never be known.

“We suspended the mypersonality app nearly a month ago because we believe that it may have violated Facebook’s policies”, Facebook VP of product partnerships Ime Archibong said in a statement provided to The Register. They will be conducting interviews and sending requests for information (to find in detail what kind of data they had access to). There are internal and external experts who conduct both on-site and off-site inspections of apps.

Facebook announced it suspended around 200 apps pending a look into their use of user data.

More than 280 people from almost 150 institutions had access to the full data set, including researchers at universities and at companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The Facebook employee also revealed that if the apps misuse the data, the developers would be banned.

The number of people affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in other US states falls roughly in line with the states’ respective populations: California had an estimated 6.8 million people affected, NY had 4.4 million potentially impacted, and an estimated 798,959 Oregonians were affected.

The suspensions were part of the first phase of an ongoing investigation and the company suggested that there will likely be more. Facebook has begun looking back over thousands of apps that had similar access before the service’s policies changed in 2014.

Facebook “will ban any developer from our platform [who] does not agree to a thorough audit”.

While we’ll have to wait to find out more, you can change app access now. In addition, a username and password to access the information was publicly available on code-sharing website GitHub, something Facebook discovered through a data-abuse bounty program it announced in April. Facebook will also tell people if their data may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.