The social media giant, Facebook, revealed a controversial stance regarding privacy issues, after thousands of developers continued to receive updates to non-public user information, even after applications’ access expired.
A report by the 9to5mac technical website stated that the incident is related to the security control that Facebook added to its systems after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in early 2018.
Facebook has added a new mechanism to its API that prevents apps from accessing user data if the user has not used the app for more than 90 days in response to criticism that it allows app developers to access too much user information.
Despite this strong measure, Facebook said it recently discovered that in some cases, this security mechanism failed to activate and allowed some applications to continue accessing user information even after the 90-day deadline.
“Recently we discovered that in some cases apps continued to receive data that people had previously allowed, even if it appeared they had not used the app in the last 90 days,” said Facebook’s vice president of platform development, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis.
The executive stressed that the company’s engineers fixed the problem the same day it appeared, along with analyzing internal records to determine the scope of the breach.
While the company did not clarify the number of affected users, and the type of their data that application developers shared even after they stopped using the application.
