Today, Facebook announced new changes in API access to as a part of cleanup after Cambridge Analytica scandal. In that, the company confirmed that as many as 87 million users’ data had been accessed.
Most of the affected people (81.6%) belong to United States. Indian politicians have also played a lot blame game but very few Indian profiles were affected. Facebook claims that data of 562455 Indian profile has been accessed in Cambridge Analytica breach.
Now Facebook is locking down all major APIs including those for Events, Groups, and Pages. Now apps will have to ask for approval from Facebook first to access any of these features. Facebook will also no longer allow apps to request personal data including religious background, education, and work history.
Until today, people could enter the phone number or email address to search for profile. This setting was by detail turn on. This feature was useful for finding a person easily but it was also abused by scammers to find profile and scrape the publicly available data. So, Facebook is now disabling this feature.
Now Facebook will show a link at the top of the News Feed so people can see what apps they use and what information they shared with those apps. If you think the app is not useful enough, you can remove apps and stop sharing data with it.
If you are using Facebook API in any of your application, you need to check the changes to make sure it doesn’t break your app. recently many people found problem in accessing to Tinder after Facebook rolled out changes in the API.
Even if Facebook is trying to show that it cares for your privacy, you must not trust on the platform blindly. You should also keep an eye on what data you are sharing on Facebook and who can access to your data. Internet is not safe, so you must take care of your privacy and security.
