Facebook suspends thousands of apps

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (KUNA) -- Facebook said that it has suspended tens of thousands of apps as a result of the ongoing App Developer Investigation that was launched following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018.
"To date, this investigation has addressed millions of apps," the company said in a blog post. "Of those, tens of thousands have been suspended for a variety of reasons while we continue to investigate." The company said it also banned a number of apps for "inappropriately sharing data obtained from us, making data publicly available without protecting people's identity or something else that was in clear violation of our policies." On his part, Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships at Facebook, said, "We initially identified apps for investigation based on how many users they had and how much data they could access." "Now, we also identify apps based on signals associated with an app's potential to abuse our policies. Where we have concerns, we conduct a more intensive examination," he confirmed.
"It is important to understand that the apps that have been suspended are associated with about 400 developers. "This is not necessarily an indication that these apps were posing a threat to people. Many were not live but were still in their testing phase when we suspended them," he noted. "It is not unusual for developers to have multiple test apps that never get rolled out. And in many cases, the developers did not respond to our request for information so we suspended them, honoring our commitment to take action," Archibong added. (end) rsr.gb