Facebook claims that Facebook suspended the apps because their CEO claimed that they will.

Meanwhile, they offer no real evidence of doing so, not even a list of names. Just a number. And even that number isn't exact, since it's around 200 out of "thousands", which is by itself a ridiculously high percentage.

Also, why the fuck would you first suspend 200 apps, publish a blog post, and then investigate what they did with the said data? Can you imagine any other app store denying service to 200 teams or individuals and then investigate any possible wrongdoings?

>Can you imagine any other app store denying service to 200 teams or individuals and then investigate any possible wrongdoings?

The government does stuff like that all the time although usually it's ~200 people over the course of a year or two, not all at once. It's something along the lines of "Whoops, looks like CPS wasn't actually doing their jobs right and we took 200 kids from otherwise not too terrible parents, well here's an official apology and a pledge to investigate this internally, don't worry we'll conclude we did nothing wrong. Maybe if we feel really guilty we'll force someone to retire a year early or something."

You can replace the above with other examples of systemic mistreatment if you want.

Sleazy utility providers and businesses with local monopoly do similar but not quite so bad things and nobody gets any recourse unless they get a check from a class action.

These kind of things typically makes the state or regional news for a day with maybe a 10sec follow up when the apology is actually issued or they find themselves innocent of wrongdoing.

When you have monopoly or near monopoly position there's less accountability and more wiggle room to behave like a jerk.

> “To date thousands of apps have been investigated and around 200 have been suspended — pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data.“

Sounds like typical PR spin, with a “no update” update. No proper numbers mentioned. Adjectives used to hide the real numbers. Most of the time this is done because the worst case scenario is being hidden. When it says “thousands”, it could mean 2000 and a few more. When it says “around 200”, you bet it’s 190 or so.

When they find violations they’re just going to ban the app? That’s it? Don’t they even consider legal action where possible?

What a waste of time and what an insult to the intelligence of the readers.

> Where we find evidence that these or other apps did misuse data, we will ban them and notify people via this website

The website in question is Facebook. My bet is this didn't even go through a PR. Rather as this slowly unfolds I really doubt if Facebook even has a PR team.

That feels like a very small number to me.

That's a ridiculously high percentage: 200 out of "thousands" tested.

Judging by their use of "thousands", I'd bet that the number is somewhere between 2000 (making 1 in 10 suspended) and 8000 (making 1 in 40 suspended).

Now if that number was out of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then the number would indeed be quite small.

However, it's possible that they prioritized this early investigation to look first at certain categories of apps that may be more likely to get suspended.

Also, it's possible that they are just being really conservative in suspending apps. The suspension sounds like a possibly temporary thing while they investigate them further.

> To date thousands of apps have been investigated and around 200 have been suspended

It doesn't really indicate how far along they are in their investigation. It says they've investigated thousands of apps so far, but we don't know (from this post, at least) how many are still pending review.

agreed, although...

"Facebook will investigate all the apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform policies in 2014"

There may not be a large number of apps that "had access to large amounts of information" before 2014.

The strategy of these firms is probably to launch a series of apps that run the spectrum of popularity, from thousands to millions of users. Banning the big ones puts a dent in the problem, but a company could have released 50 apps with 10,000 users each that sucked down profiles of 1 million people each (via calls to friends' data). My guess is that each of those would not qualify as "large" by Facebook standards.

We approved what these apps did for our benefit originally. Now we got caught and will unapprove them for no stated reason because it might be embarrassing.

If you believe a word Facebook says, I have a country to sell you.