Remember all those fun personality quizzes that ran rampant during the earlier days of Facebook? They were fun to take and also great for discussion and comparisons with friends, but unfortunately some of them were less innocent than you think. Facebook’s privacy scandal with Cambridge Analytica proved just that, and now it looks like there might be another issue.Facebook recently confirmed that they have suspended over 400 Facebook apps over concerns about how user data was being handled and used, and in a blog post, Facebook’s VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong confirmed that at least one of the apps, myPersonality, might have misused user data. As a result, Facebook will be notifying roughly 4 million users who have used the app.
According to the blog post, “Today we banned myPersonality — an app that was mainly active prior to 2012 — 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.”
Archibong also adds, “Since launching our investigation in March, we have investigated thousands of apps. And we have suspended more than 400 due to concerns around the developers who built them or how the information people chose to share with the app may have been used — which we are now investigating in much greater depth.”
More recently Facebook’s Onavo app has been removed from Apple’s iOS App Store over privacy concerns about how the app, designed to be a VPN, tracks user activity across apps.