Facebook has suspended about 200 apps in the wake of allegations of data privacy violations by election consultant Cambridge Analytica, the social media platform announced Monday.
After a whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica said the company had improperly used information from millions of Facebook users for the Brexit campaign and US President Donald Trump's campaign, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in March announced an investigation and audit of outside apps.
‘The investigation process is in full swing,’ Facebook said in a statement.
The probe has examined thousands of apps, ‘and around 200 have been suspended - pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data,’ the company said.
‘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 psychology researcher who launched a Facebook app is believed to have inappropriately passed data to Cambridge Analytica.
The app collected data not only from hundreds of thousands of Facebook users who answered survey questions but information about their friends, estimated at up to 87 million people.
