Facebook shared data with 5,000 developers even after users stopped using apps’ services

NEW DELHI: In a breach of privacy, Facebook continued to share data with about 5,000 developers even after users had stopped using the services of these apps. The issue was fixed after it came to the company's attention.
"Recently we discovered that in some instances apps continued to receive the data that people had previously authorized, even if it appeared they hadn’t used the app in the last 90 days... We fixed the issue the day after we found it. We’ll keep investigating and will continue to prioritize transparency around any major updates," the social media giant stated in a blog post released late on Wednesday.
The post, written by Facebook's VP of Platform Partnerships Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, also announced new policies to strengthen privacy. "These new terms limit the information developers can share with third parties without explicit consent from people. They also strengthen data security requirements and clarify when developers must delete data," Papamiltiadis wrote.
Facebook had announced the 90-day expiration period after the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data breach, where personal data of users collected by an app, was harvested for targeted political ads on the platform. It had said that developers would have to ask users for permission to re-access their data, which includes information like email addresses, birthdays and gender, if the user did not use the app for more than 90 days.
Though a breach in users' privacy, the Silicon Valley company said they "haven’t seen evidence that this issue resulted in sharing information that was inconsistent with the permissions people gave when they logged in using Facebook."