In Cambridge Analytica clean-up, Facebook says it killed 'Tens of Thousands' of apps

Of course they announced it at the end of the day on Friday, that's what you do with bad news.

In a Facebook blog post from Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships, Facebook says it has had suspended tens of thousands of apps and 400 developers as part of its internal investigation following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Clearly, from the numbers today alone, data privacy remains an unresolved problem for Facebook.

Facebook says it began investigating apps in March 2018 after it became publicly known that the UK-based dirty data dealers Cambridge Analytica obtained and exploited the personal data of individual Facebook users without their consent.

That ongoing review has so far examined millions of apps, Facebook says in the blog post, and the latest round of tens of thousands of now-suspended apps are associated with 400 or so different developers.

Excerpt from An Update on Our App Developer Investigation,Friday, September 20, 2019 from the Facebook Newsroom:

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.

In a few cases, we have banned apps completely.