With trust destroyed, Facebook is haunted by old data deals

As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled its […]

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Facebook ends platform policy banning apps that copy its features

Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates “Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides.” Facebook had previously enforced that policy selectively to hurt competitors that had used […]

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Facebook finds ‘no evidence’ hackers accessed connected apps

Facebook has said it’s found “no evidence” that third-party apps were affected by the data breach it revealed last week. Hackers stole account access tokens on at least 50 million users by exploiting a chain of three vulnerabilities inadvertently introduced by Facebook last year. Another 40 million may have been also been affected by the attack. […]

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Facebook quietly relaunches Apps For Groups platform after lockdown

Facebook is becoming a marketplace for enterprise apps that help Group admins manage their communities. To protect itself and its users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook locked down the Groups API for building apps for Groups. These apps had to go through a human-reviewed approval process, and lost access to Group […]

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Facebook mistakenly leaked developer analytics reports to testers

Set the “days without a Facebook’s privacy problem” counter to zero. This week, an alarmed developer contacted TechCrunch, informing us that their Facebook App Analytics weekly summary email had been delivered to someone outside their company. It contains sensitive business information including weekly average users, page views, and new users. 43 hours after we contacted […]

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Facebook and Instagram Stories open to sharing from other apps

Facebook is recruiting help to make its Stories more interesting than Snapchat’s. Starting with Spotify, SoundCloud, and GoPro, third-party apps can now let their users share to Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories. Rather than screenshotting, users will be able to hit a button to share a photo or video of a playlist, song, or mini-movie […]

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Facebook shuts down custom feed sharing prompts and 12 other APIs

Facebook is making good on Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to prioritize user safety and data privacy over its developer platform. Today Facebook and Instagram announced a slew of API shut downs and changes designed to stop developers from being able to pull you or your friends data without express permission, drag in public content, or trick […]

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Cambridge Analytica denies accessing data on 87M users, claims 30M

Cambridge Analytica is refuting a report by Facebook today that said Cambridge Analytica improperly attained data on up to 87 million users. Instead, it claims it only “licensed data for no more than 30 million people” from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan’s research company Global Science Research. It also claims none of this data was used in work on […]

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Facebook launches bulk app removal tool amidst privacy scandal

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, users have flocked to their Facebook privacy settings to sever their connection to third-party apps that they no longer wanted to have access to their data. But deleting them all took forever because you had to remove them one by one. Now Facebook has released a new way to select […]

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