Facebook Bans Personality Quiz App, Second Since Cambridge Analytica Scandal

After a massive data privacy scandal stemming from an online personality quiz app rocked Facebook earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network banned another such app. Facebook announced Wednesday that myPersonality, a dormant quiz app intended for academic research, was banned from the site.

After the app that kickstarted the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, myPersonality is only the second app Facebook has banned, per the Associated Press.

David Stillwell created myPersonality in 2007, and according to Facebook, it has not been used much since 2012. Still, Facebook felt the need to shut it down because users who took the quiz gave their personal information to those who created it, information which was reportedly then passed on to researchers and companies.

The site claimed around four million people in total gave their information to myPersonality.

Facebook also claimed the shutdown occurred because the app’s creators refused to go along with a Facebook inspection. The social network has been investigating and suspending hundreds of apps this year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out. According to Facebook, it has now suspended 400 apps pending investigations into data breaches.

Stillwell said in a statement that Facebook’s ban of myPersonality was “purely cosmetic” as nobody’s data had been misused. Facebook conceded in its statement the only people who gave their data to myPersonality were those who took the quiz; there is no evidence that Facebook friends’ data was breached, as has been the worry with other Facebook privacy scandals.

That said, Facebook will reach out and notify the people who took the quiz that their data may have been misused.

“We will continue to investigate apps and make the changes needed to our platform to ensure that we are doing all we can to protect people’s information,” Facebook said.

The Cambridge Analytica debacle started when the election consulting firm by that name took data belonging to 87 million Facebook users. The data had been collected by a psychologist named Aleksandr Kogan who retrieved the information from a personality test.

In June, a hacker found that another quiz app had taken Facebook user data, which Facebook eventually fixed.

Despite all of these privacy issues, a recent survey indicated most Facebook users still use the app just as much as they did a year ago.