Facebook Suspends 200 Apps Over Data Abuse

Facebook has banned about 200 apps in the first stage of its review into apps that had access to large quantities of user data in an aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook said it has looked into thousands of apps till date as part of an investigation that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 21.

“The apps were suspended pending a thorough investigation into whether they misused any data,” Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of product partnerships said on Monday.

Mr Zuckerberg had said the social media giant will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before the company curtailed data access in 2014.

“There is a lot more work to be done to find all the apps that may have misused people’s Facebook data and it will take time.

“We have large teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible,”Archibong said.

Facebook was hit by the privacy scandal in mid-March after media reports that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to build profiles on American voters and influence the 2016 presidential election that took Donald Trump to the White House.

The company lost billions in market value in the wake of the incident, prompting Zuckerberg to apologise for the mistakes his company made in Congressional hearing.

But the company’s value has since moved north, as it reported a surprisingly strong 63 per cent rise in profit and an increase in users when it announced quarterly results on April 25.