NEW YORK — Facebook has banned one app and suspended over 400 more following investigations into developers and how they handled user data.
The social network said Wednesday that it had suspended the apps “due to concerns around the developers who built them or how the information people chose to share with the app may have been used.”
Facebook also announced that it had banned a personality-quiz app that collected information on more than 4 million people. The company said the researchers behind the app, called myPersonality, refused to allow it to conduct an audit.
It did not say that it had found evidence of data misuse, but cited concerns about how the data was handled.
Facebook declined to name the 400 apps it had suspended, the number of which has doubled since May. The company said it was now investigating them “in much greater depth.”
The suspensions are the latest example of fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that an app on Facebook had been used to amass information on 87 million people for the purpose of creating profiles of and targeting ads to potential voters.
Facebook said it would notify all 4 million people who had used myPersonality, to warn that their data “may have been misused.” The app was suspended in April, but it hadn’t been active on the platform since 2012.
David Stillwell, one of the creators of the app, said the ban was “nonsensical and purely for PR reasons.”
“When the app was suspended three months ago I asked Facebook to explain which of their terms was broken but so far they have been unable to cite any instances,” he said in a statement.
