Facebook has banned myPersonality after discovering that the app took the personal information of 4 million users, and shared it with researchers, and third-party companies. In a statement released in a blog post on the site, Facebook Vice President of product partnerships Ime Archibong says the company reached this decision after the app didn’t comply with their request for an audit, signaling that they had something to hide. "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 wrote.
Facebook has been working diligently since March following the debacle of Cambridge Analytica, where the personal data of 87 million users was gathered and shared through a personal quiz. Unlike the Cambridge Analytica situation, it appears that the quiz didn’t have any impact on the acquisition of information from a user’s friends. "Given we currently have no evidence that myPersonality accessed any friends’ information, we will not be notifying these people’s Facebook friends," Archibong wrote. If the company discovers that the info of friends has been shared, Archibong added, "We will notify them."
After looking into thousands of apps over the last few months, 400 have been deactivated by Facebook. The company announced earlier this week that they uncovered and removed hundreds of Iranian and Russian-backed disinformation accounts. Facebook is working to ease the concerns of their users, but every time news like this pops up, they go right back to square one.
