By Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships
Here is an update on the app investigation and audit that Mark Zuckerberg promised on March 21.
As Mark explained, Facebook will investigate all the apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform policies in 2014 — significantly reducing the data apps could access. He also made clear that where we had concerns about individual apps we would audit them — and any app that either refused or failed an audit would be banned from Facebook.
The investigation process is in full swing, and it has two phases. First, a comprehensive review to identify every app that had access to this amount of Facebook data. And second, where we have concerns, we will conduct interviews, make requests for information (RFI) — which ask a series of detailed questions about the app and the data it has access to — and perform audits that may include on-site inspections.
We have large teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible. To date thousands of apps have been investigated and around 200 have been suspended — pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data. Where we find evidence that these or other apps did misuse data, we will ban them and notify people via this website. It will show people if they or their friends installed an app that misused data before 2015 — just as we did for Cambridge Analytica.
There is a lot more work to be done to find all the apps that may have misused people’s Facebook data – and it will take time. We are investing heavily to make sure this investigation is as thorough and timely as possible. We will keep you updated on our progress.