Facebook suspended the popular apps
Cambridge Analytica is the United Kingdom -based political consulting firm that had improperly licensed info on upwards of 87 million Facebook users - most of whom had no idea their data had been harvested, via a quiz app hosted on the platform in 2013.
Facebook has revealed that it has suspended around 200 apps as part of an ongoing audit to establish third-party apps that may have misused Facebook users' data. The company said in an update, its first look since the social network announced the internal audit in March, that the apps would now undergo a "thorough investigation" into whether they had misused user data.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the app audit on March 21, writing that the company would "investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity". In the case of myPersonality, New Scientist reported that between the data breach and business-as-usual information sharing, there's no feasible way to know or identify every party that has now accessed that information.
Over 87 million users whose data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica were promised of an alert.
"We are investing heavily to make sure this investigation is as thorough and timely as possible", he adds.
The company profited from a feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends.
Android users who installed the Facebook app to their phones before the Android 4.1 version and granted access to their contact lists were, according to the filing, also granting Facebook permission to automatically collect data on texts, calls, duration of calls and recipients.
Facebook did not provide any additional details as to which of the apps had been suspended, how many users had used the apps or what was the reason that led Facebook to suspect that those apps had been misused. Apps requesting to see other data, such as the posts likes and photos, will need to be approved by Facebook.
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