Sina Science and Technology News in the early morning of September 21st Beijing time, Facebook IncIt said on Friday that it had temporarily blocked tens of thousands of apps for a variety of reasons as part of an investigation launched last year into a major data privacy scandal.

In March 2018, Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy, collected data on as many as 87 million Facebook Inc users without permission, in a scandal that raised concerns about whether the world's largest social networking company had done enough to protect the data of its 2.4 billion users and sparked scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators.

Subsequently, Facebook Inc began to investigate developers who have access to user data. The company said many of the temporarily banned apps from 400 app developers were still being tested and unavailable during the period.

"this does not necessarily mean that these apps are posing a threat to people," said Ime Archibong, Facebook Inc's vice president in charge of product cooperation, in a blog post.

Some apps were temporarily blocked because developers did not respond to Facebook Inc's requests for more information, while others were completely blocked because they improperly shared user data or violated Facebook Inc's rules.

"apart from those that have been notified to the public, we have not confirmed other cases of abuse, but so far the investigation has not been completed." Azibang wrote in a blog post.

Facebook Inc did not provide a list of temporarily banned apps. (Tang Feng)