If you’ve been following the news around Cambridge Analytica, the data consultancy firm hired by the Donald Trump campaign for the 2016 US election that harvested the data of up to 50 million Facebook users without their permission through data collected from third-party apps, you may want to know how to make sure that something similar isn’t happening to you.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Go to Facebook.com (it’s easier on a computer)
- Click the little arrow all the way on the top-right of the screen:
- Click on Settings
- Look for the Apps button on the menu on the left-hand side of the screen and click on it:
- This page will tell you how many other apps have access to all or some of your Facebook data. I had 192 connected apps, and others I’ve seen had a few dozen, and some had over 1,000.
- Click the Show All button about halfway down to see every app.
- You have to click on the little “x” that appears when you hover over an app to delete each one of them, one-by-one. This will take time.
- Start with the apps or sites that you don’t use (or perhaps don’t even remember using—Facebook is 14 years old, after all), and then move on to the newer ones.
