Facebook Suspends About 200 Suspicious Apps In Data Misuse Probe

MENLO PARK, CA — Facebook has suspended about 200 apps — out of a review of thousands — as part of its investigation into improper data use in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in March announced that his company would investigate "all apps that had access to large amounts of information" before the company changed its platform to dramatically reduce data access four years ago. He said Facebook would also conduct a full audit of any app with "suspicious activity."

Monday's update of that announcement said the investigation process is in "full swing."

"We have large teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible," the company said. "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."

Facebook says it will ban any apps if it finds evidence of data misuse and will notify users 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," Facebook said.

Further details about the apps, including the names, weren't immediately released.

Zuckerberg previously wrote in a post that Facebook has a responsibility to protect its users' data. If it can't, then it doesn't "deserve" to serve its users, he wrote.

A Cambridge University researcher five years ago created a personality quiz app that was installed by around 300,000 people, Zuckerberg says. Those people shared their data — as well as some of their friends' data — and the researcher was eventually able to access tens of millions of peoples' data.

The following year, Facebook changed its platform to prevent abuse by significantly limiting the data that apps could access, Zuckerberg says.

"Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app," he says. "We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today."

In 2015, Facebook learned that the researcher had shared data from his app with the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica without users' consent. Facebook banned the researcher's app and demanded that both he and Cambridge Analytica certify they had deleted all improperly acquired data, which they did.

But in March, Facebook says it learned Cambridge Analyitica may not have deleted all the data, as the firm had promised. The social media giant then banned the firm.

Authorities in Britain and the U.S. were investigating whether Cambridge Analytica may have used that data to try to sway elections, including the 2016 presidential race. The Associated Press previously reported that special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is investigating Russian meddling in U.S. elections, asked former campaign officials about the Trump campaign’s data operations — particularly about how it collected and used voter data in swing states.

The investigators also asked some of Trump’s data team about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica. Federal records indicated the campaign paid the firm nearly $6 million, AP reported.

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