Can Facebook’s New Data Use Checkup Prevent Another Privacy Disaster

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is one of the worst privacy problems that Facebook has ever had to face, and part of what made this scandal such a huge issue to deal with was the fact that data gathered from users of Facebook by the platform itself was used in an attempt to subvert one of the most important elections in the world. While many criticized Facebook for having this kind of data in the first place, at the end of the day it was the developer that was responsible for the misuse of this kind of information and it turns out that Facebook is going to be trying to prevent developers from behaving like this in the future.

Facebook is doing this by rolling out new data use checkups. These checkups are going to be a requirement for any developers that are trying to make use of Facebook’s data or its APIs and the essence of this is that this added step is going to make it so that the vast majority of developers are not even going to try and look into misusing data. This is definitely a good step and chances are that it might allow the developers to become a lot more responsible with regards to the manner in which they use data.

With all of that having been said and out of the way, it is important to note that a lot of people are still criticizing Facebook due to the reason that they feel like the social media platform shouldn’t be collecting information that can be misused like this. While some argue that Facebook needs this data in order to do what it does so well, some would still say that Facebook’s data protection policies are lax and that the social media giant will need to do a lot more than this to get back into people’s good graces.



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