Facebook announces ban on Personality Quiz Apps on its platform

Facebook announced ban on personality quiz apps on its platform. The decision is taken after last years Cambridge Analytica Scandal, which helped researcher’s to access personal information of about 87 million facebooks users by using quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife”. Such move is part of broader crackdown by Facebook on dubious developers.

Key Highlights

• Facebook is updating its platform policies to include provisions that apps with minimal utility, such as personality quizzes, may not be permitted on the platform.
• The apps may not ask for data that doesn’t enrich the in-app, user experience on the social media platform.
• It includes removing access to number of application programming interfaces (APIs), updating platform policies, regularly evaluating app’s access to user permissions. It will also lock down older (APIs) from accessing user data.
• If user has previously approved permissions which app has not used or accessed in past 90 days may be considered expired and access to such expired permissions will be revoked. It will also periodically review, audit and remove permissions that older apps have not used.

Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Cambridge University (UK) researcher Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research created an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” in 2014. It paid its users to give psychological test and app collected data. It also collected data on person’s Facebook friends. A. Kogan further passed this data to British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, thus millions of Facebook profiles were mined for data. Later, Kogan with Cambridge Analytica created software solution to help influence choices in elections.
US 2016 Election Mendeling: Facebook data was also used to develop “psychographic” (means, qualitative methodology used to describe consumers on psychological attributes) profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online during 2016 US Presidential elections.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2019