Nearly 200 ‘Suspicious Apps’ Have Been Suspended by Facebook

Cambridge

As part of its ongoing audit of third party applications running on the platform following Cambridge Analytica’s data misuse, Facebook has today announced that it has suspended nearly 200 apps out of the “thousands” of apps reviewed so far, pending “thorough investigation” into whether or not their developers misused Facebook user data (via TechCrunch). 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced back in March that Facebook would investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before the company changed its platform to dramatically reduce data access, adding that apps that would not agree to a “thorough audit” would also be banned. 

Facebook’s VP of product partnerships Ime Archibong has today revealed that the investigation is “in full swing”, without being specific about the total number of apps that have been reviewed so far.

“We have large teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible,” he says. “To date 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. Where we find evidence that these or other apps did misuse data, we will ban them and notify people via this website. It will show people if they or their friends installed an app that misused data before 2015 — just as we did for Cambridge Analytica.”

A Facebook spokeswoman has said that the company will provide more details about any apps it decides to ban after concluding each case-by-case investigation.

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