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Facebook suspends around 200 apps in data misuse investigation

Facebook's investigation into data misuse by third parties is in full swing.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
2 min read
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Facebook is taking a long, hard look at third-parties apps.

Lionel Bonaventure / AFP/Getty Images

Facebook has suspended around 200 apps as part of its investigation into whether companies misused personal user data gathered from the social network.

The company has evaluated thousands of apps to see if they had access to large amounts of data, and will now thoroughly investigate those it has identified as potentially misusing that data, it said in a blog post on Monday.

"Where we have concerns, we will conduct interviews, make requests for information (RFI) -- which ask a series of detailed questions about the app and the data it has access to -- and perform audits that may include on-site inspections," said Ime Archibong, Facebook's VP of product partnerships.

The investigation is part of Facebook's response to the revelations about Cambridge Analytica's collection of user data in March, after which the company was forced to admit it had allowed the data of tens of million of users to be mishandled. The company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised the investigation as one of a number of measures put in place to handle the scandal.

Though Facebook suspects roughly 200 apps of violating its policies by using its data for purposes beyond the apps' stated purposes, the company will not release a list of those apps. If Facebook's investigation confirms individual apps misused data, users who interacted with the apps will be notified.

The investigation is ongoing and the number of apps that raise red flags could continue to rise. "There is a lot more work to be done to find all the apps that may have misused people's Facebook data -- and it will take time,"said Archibong.

-CBS News contributed to this report.