The popular quiz app primarily remained active before 2012. Powered by Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, the app offered various personality tests to collect users’ data from Facebook. The institution used the data for various researches and academic purposes. They also offered the data to others upon requests. The CPC staff used to vet every request prior approval.
However, Facebook noticed the app shared the data with some firms who only have“limited protection”. They first suspended the app with 200 other apps from its site after suspecting misuse of data. Now, Facebook has outright banned the app. As stated by Ime Archibong, Vice President of Product Partnerships,
“Today we banned myPersonality… from Facebook for failing to agree to our request to audit and because it’s clear that they shared information with researchers as well as companies with only limited protections in place.”The official said that Facebook will warn the 4 million users of the app who have shared their details with the app.
“Given we currently have no evidence that myPersonality accessed any friends’ information, we will not be notifying these people’s Facebook friends. Should that change, we will notify them.”
Facebook has also made changes to their policies. Now, apps will not receive user data if unused for 90 days. Facebook further pledge to continue with their creation of policies that ensure user security.
“We will continue to investigate apps and make the changes needed to our platform to ensure that we are doing all we can to protect people’s information.”Take your time to comment on this article.
