Facebook has suspended 200 apps amid an wide-ranging investigation into misuse of user data.
The apps were not named, but in a blog post Monday morning, Facebook said they will be suspended pending a thorough investigation into whether they misused data.
The investigation comes after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, which was a data firm that worked with President Trump’s 2016 campaign, improperly harvested the information of roughly 87 million users without their knowledge.
Cambridge Analytica was able to collect the data by using an app that offered a personality test, though the firm has maintained it did nothing wrong.
The data breach caused a massive backlash for Facebook, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to Capitol Hill in March to tell lawmakers how the social media giant would fix data privacy issues.
Zuckerberg promised the app investigation on March 21. The investigation is “in full swing,” Facebook said in the blog post Monday.
First, investigators identified every app that had access to large amounts of information before Facebook changed its platform policies in 2014.
To date, thousands of apps have been investigated.
“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,” Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of product partnerships, said Monday. “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.”
