Facebook Suspends ‘Tens Of Thousands’ of Apps over Privacy Concerns

Facebook is still struggling to protect its users privacy.

The social network said on Friday that it had removed “tens of thousands” of apps over concerns that they may have inappropriately accessed the personal data of its users.

In an update posted on its official blog, Facebook said it utilized the services of “hundreds of people: attorneys, external investigators, data scientists, engineers, policy specialists, platform partners, and other teams across the company” to investigate the use of personal data by third parties following the Cambridge Analytica story.

“To date, this investigation has addressed millions of apps. Of those, tens of thousands have been suspended for a variety of reasons while we continue to investigate,” wrote Facebook.

Facebook tried to downplay the mass suspensions, emphasizing that the suspended apps were associated with a small number of developers and that many were inactive:

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. 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.

The social network, which boasts over 2 billion users worldwide, was recently challenged by  Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) to submit to a third-party audit on political bias, and to sell WhatsApp and Instagram to address competition concerns. According to Hawley, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said no to both.

Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.