Facebook bans the famous ‘Personality Quiz apps’ to avoid a second Cambridge Analytica data leak

Facebook has always been home to some of the most useful, funny and weird things, and one of them is the personality quiz apps. These apps use the information provided by the user to find out what their personality traits are and who do they closely resemble to (a popular celebrity, animal or anything else). It’s a fun way to know what the results will be as it is never certain.

But now, Facebook has decided to ban the personality quiz apps on its platforms. Since they have been active on the social platform for years, they were able to collect a lot of user information from a large number of Facebook users.

It should be noted that the ban comes a year after the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal where the data firm had collected information of up to 87 million users around the world. For collecting the information, it used the quiz app ‘thisisyourdigitallife’.

Although the ban on the quiz apps comes a year after the scandal but it should be noted that the personality quizzes weren’t the main problem. The quizzes were, no doubt, a great platform for collecting and storing a large amount of user data. The quizzes themselves worked because of the data the users provided it with, the problem was that the platform (Facebook) itself allowed the developers to collect the data. The collected data of the user could have been used by anyone for anything and was not kept secure.

Facebook’s ban on the personality quiz apps is a part of a ‘broader crackdown’ by the social giant on what the developers have access to and what they can do on the platform. Also, on similar note, Facebook is also locking down many old APIs (Application Programming Interface) for accessing the user data. This lockdown will prevent the developers from accessing the new user data if the user hasn’t used the app in the last three months.

It should be taken into account that the social giant Facebook had announced some changes on its platform around a year ago. In that announcement, the 3 months/ 90 days access limit was also included. Although the 3 months limit was not put into effect before, but it has been done now.

But this new change and ban comes after a number of data leaks reported since the start of the year. There were a number of problems Facebook found itself in the past couple of months, which put it into a vulnerable position. And banning some old personality quizzes so that they can’t access the user data isn’t possibly going to solve anything if it doesn’t make its own platform stronger.