Maybe you've already heard the previous issue of Facebook giving user data to particular third-party developers, even after saying straight up and specifically telling users that they won't do that.
The leaked blog post
In a blog post on Wednesday, Facebook itself has announced that thousands of developers will continue to receive certain updates to users' information despite being NON-PUBLIC well past the point when they actually should have had it.
Specifically, Facebook recently said that, for an unknown number of users, it has failed to actually cut off the data spigot, like it previously promised it would do back in 2018, 90 days after a particular individual had last used the app.
Mashable tried to reach out to Facebook in the attempt of determining the actual number of users that had their data improperly sent towards third-party apps, but they have had no immediate response.
Facebook's own blog post does provide a few insights into the whole privacy mishap, however. The company still writes that the user info that is questioned possibly involved particular email addresses, language, birthdays, and even gender. It was then sent to about 5,000 past the whole 90-day threshold.
According to Facebook's vice president of the platform partners Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, it was recently discovered that in some particular instances apps that continued to receive data that people had already previously authorized, even if it still appeared that they hadn't used the app pas the previous 90 days.
It was also explained that for example, this could be possible if a certain person used a fitness app in order to invite their friends from their own hometown to a workout, but Facebook did not recognize that these particular friends have been inactive for a number of months.
The previous promises of Facebook
Notably, this is actually not the first time that third-party developers have been able to receive improper access to the Facebook user's own data. In late 2019, Papamiltiadis had written another shocking blog post that played down a quite similar situation.
Once again, back in the year 2018, Papamiltiadis was even forced to awkwardly explain the reason why certain third-party companies were able to access troubling amounts of particular Facebook users' data. He then assured everyone, just like he is doing right now, that the company is currently working on it.
It was also written that Facebook has taken a number of steps this current year in order to limit developers' access towards people's own Facebook information, and as a part of this whole ongoing effort, they are also in the midst of actually reviewing all of the APIs and also the partners who are able to access them.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has been dealing with a lot of heat as big companies are pulling billions of advertisements from Facebook following the #StopHateForProfit movement.
