Facebook and privacy are not the best of friends. But in the social media's ongoing attempts to plug data leaks, the company is making some changes.
"As part of our ongoing commitments to privacy and security, we are making updates to our platform," wrote director of product management Eddie O’Neil in a blog post.
The social network took to the post to say that it is removing third-party developer access to a number of old APIs effective April 30. In addition to that, apps are also restricted from asking for data that doesn’t directly improve the in-app user experience.
"These updates include removing access to a number of APIs, updating our platform policies, and regularly evaluating an app's access to user permissions," continued O’Neil.
"No new apps will have access to these APIs as of April 30, 2019," he continued.
In addition to the above, Facebook Platform Policies are also updated to include provisions that apps with "minimal utility." These include things like "personality quizzes".
And as for apps that were previously approved user permission, but not used or accessed in the past 90 days, are going to be considered expired. These apps will have permissions revoked, closing the doors for potential abuse and data leaks.
"Going forward, we will periodically review, audit, and remove permissions that your app has not used. Developers can submit for App Review to re-gain access to expired permissions," wrote O’Neil.
"Apps with minimal utility that provide predictions, assessments, or similar outputs to the user, may not be allowed on Platform. For example, apps that provide (or claim to provide) users with assessments of personality, personal attributes, character traits, behavioral tendencies, or whose core functionality otherwise involves making predictions about who the user is, may not be allowed," reads the revised Platform Policy.
The goal here, is to make Facebook to have a more streamlined and straightforward experience for developers, and at the same time, eliminating the needs for certain supplemental terms.
"We're committed to supporting our developers and providing resources for building on our platform," continued O’Neil.
Since the frequent data leaks, the Russians in meddling with the U.S. Presidential Election with ads and others, Facebook's reputation has experienced considerable damage.
The policy changes are like Facebook in taking baby steps to plug potential data leaks on its platform.
The much-needed updates to the developer platform come more than a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that improperly accessed personal information of as many as 87 million users without their consent.
The data was harvested through a quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife” developed by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge professor, who was paid by the now-defunct data mining company to acquire the collected user information to create voter profiles for the Trump campaign during 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The data scandal considerably eroded public’s trust in Facebook, and the updates, although not considered much, are a welcome step towards bringing back that trust.