Facebook has trouble finding user data collected by apps

Facebook is struggling to find user data collected by apps on Facebook until 2015. Some of the companies behind those apps no longer exist or don’t respond to requests for information.

Facebook is trying to figure out where data ended up after apps on the platform gained access to it, The Wall Street Journal reports. Facebook promised to look into where user data had gone in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had collected data from tens of millions of Facebook users.

If there are indications that something is wrong, people will come to check developers’ servers and question the developers in question. Facebook confirms the information from the business paper and adds that many developers cooperate with Facebook, but that it is difficult to verify, because in many cases it has been years. The APIs could be used to collect data from 2007 to 2015.

Facebook is investigating the developers as it suspects some of them may have broken the rules for using APIs by collecting more data about the social network’s users than was allowed. This also happened with the data that Cambridge Analytica had acquired.