Facebook’s Suspension of ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Apps Reveals Wider Privacy Issues

“We are far from finished,” Mr. Archibong wrote. “As each month goes by, we have incorporated what we learned and re-examined the ways that developers can build using our platforms. We’ve also improved the ways we investigate and enforce against potential policy violations that we find.”

The Silicon Valley company has been dueling with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office to keep documents related to its app investigation out of the public eye. The state prosecutor began examining Facebook’s data sharing practices in early 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica revelations broke and issued several civil subpoenas to the company for information. Last month, Facebook had petitioned a judge in Boston to seal the records. The seal was lifted on Friday.

“For nearly a year, Facebook has fought to shield information about improper data-sharing with app developers,” Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, said in a statement. “If only Facebook cared this much about privacy when it was giving away the personal data of everyone you know online.”

According to the court documents, Facebook told the attorney general’s office that it had identified approximately two million apps that required a close examination to determine whether they had misused people’s personal data. The investigation narrowed to focus on a group of 10,000 apps, one document said.

Of the 10,000 apps, 6,000 were flagged because a large number of people installed them, which could expose them to data misuse. Facebook conducted a “detailed background check” of developers behind 2,000 apps to determine whether they had connections to “entities of interest” or revealed any signs of fraud, according to the court documents. Another group of 2,000 apps received a technical review from Facebook, which looked at internal records to determine whether the apps had made broad data requests that could indicate misuse, the documents said.

The Massachusetts prosecutor said in a court filing that it sent Facebook a demand to reveal the names of the apps involved in the investigation. The company declined to identify them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/technology/facebook-data-privacy-suspension.html?emc=rss&partner=rss