In recent months, many have wondered how many more companies like Cambridge Analytica have collected private information on Facebook users without their consent.
Facebook has now hinted at an answer May 14, announcing that it suspended 200 apps as it investigates whether they had misused people’s data.
In a post, Ime Archibong, the company’s VP of product partnerships, said that Facebook has looked into the activity of “thousands” of apps, explaining that the investigation process has two phases. Facebook first identifies apps that had access to “large amounts of data,” like Cambridge Analytica, the data firm and Trump campaign consultant that harvested the information of 87 million unwitting users.
For any apps Facebook is concerned with, it then conducts interviews and asks for detailed information about the app and its data usage. It will also perform audits that may include on-site inspections. If the company finds an app misused user data, Facebook users will be notified through a special website. This new security process is for apps installed before 2015, before the company changed certain rules on what information apps can access.
As with most of its announcements in the past scandal-ridden months, Facebook says there is “a lot more work to be done.”