Interestingly, last week one of those initially suspended apps, Crimson Hexagon, announced that it has been un-suspended from Facebook’s platform.įacebook, in July, said it had suspended Crimson Hexagon due to concerns about the collection and sharing of data. MyPersonality is only one of many apps that the company has looked at – Facebook said that since March, it has investigated thousands of apps, and suspended 400 of those due to concerns around data misuse and user data privacy. In March, the company’s firestorm around data privacy and misuse started with an app developer violating the company’s platform policies by collecting data via an app under the pretense of using it for psychological research – and instead passing users’ personal information to Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. There is no current evidence that myPersonality had accessed the Facebook “friends” of those impacted – though that may change, Facebook said.īut apps passing data to outside third parties is a sore spot for Facebook. This data was anonymised and samples of it were shared with registered academic collaborators around the world through the myPersonality project, resulting in over 45 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals.”įacebook did not specify what specific data was passed to researchers, and where the specific violations occurred. “The application was active until 2012 and collected data from over 6 million volunteers during this time. “As well as the data from the tests, around 40% of the respondents also opted in to share data from their Facebook profile, resulting in one of the largest social science research databases in history,” according to the app project’s website. David Stillwell, the creator of the app, did not respond to a request for comment on the situation from Threatpost. MyPersonality is a Facebook app, created in 2007, enabling users to participate in psychological research by filling in a personality questionnaire, and then also offered users feedback on their scores. “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 said in a post. myPersonality Banįacebook VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong said on Wednesday that the company will ban an app called myPersonality and notify the roughly 4 million impacted users after discovering that the app had misused information collected from them. The recent incidents also reveal a behind-the-curtains look at how the giant is still struggling to navigate data privacy. The news comes as privacy experts are pushing the social media giant to double-down on its efforts around social media data privacy – especially on the heels of its backlash around the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March. First, Facebook acknowledged in a public post that one of the apps on its platform, myPersonality, inappropriately shared 4 million users’ data with researchers. Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook pulled its data security service, Onavo Protect, from Apple’s official App Store after Apple said that the app violated its data collection policies.įacebook responded: “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.” Facebook was hit with a double privacy punch regarding data privacy on Wednesday.
0 kommentar(er)
