Facebook bans apps used for data theft
SAN FRANSCISCO, April 27, 2019: Facebook has announced to ban personality quiz apps on its platform — a move taken after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year that helped researchers access personal information of 87 million users via the quiz app "thisisyourdigitallife".
The ban on personality quizzes is part of a broader crackdown by Facebook on dubious developers.
Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research created an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" in 2014.
The users were paid to take a psychological test and the app collected the data. It also gathered data on a person's Facebook friends.
Kogan passed the data to British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. In this way, millions of Facebook profiles were mined for data.
Kogan along with Cambridge Analytica then created a software solution to help influence choices in elections.
Facebook data was used to develop "psychographic" profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online during the 2016 US Presidential elections.
(IANS)