myPersonality app misused 4 million users' personal data, removed from Facebook

Facebook said it would notify those who were affected.

New Delhi: A Facebook investigation has revealed that personal data of nearly four million users have been misused by a third-party app called `myPersonality`.

“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,”

“As a result we will notify the roughly 4 million people who chose to share their Facebook information with myPersonality that it may have been misused. Given we currently have no evidence that myPersonality accessed any friends’ information, we will not be notifying these people’s Facebook friends. Should that change, we will notify them,” he added.

Facebook launched its investigation in March into thousands of third-party apps after being caught in massive Cambridge Analytica scandal. It has 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.

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, the blogpost said.