Yahoo Finance Facebook suspends analytics company over data collection
Facebook has suspended apps by Crimson Hexagon as it investigates whether the Boston-based analytics firm is violating its policies in how it collects and shares user data.
News of the suspension comes after The Wall Street Journal queried Crimson Hexagon's contracts with US government agencies and a Russian non-profit with links to the Kremlin.
The newspaper cited documents which it claimed showed that Crimson had used publicly accessible data from Facebook to study public opinion of president Vladimir Putin, as part of its contract with the Russian group, and said it had accumulated the largest repository of public social media posts from a variety of sites and apps.
Facebook's vice president of product partnerships, Ime Archibong, said the social media company was "investigating the claims about Crimson Hexagon to see if they violated any of our policies".
Although Facebook allows developers to produce "anonymised insights for business purposes", it does not "allow developers to build surveillance tools using information from Facebook or Instagram".
We take these allegations very seriously, and have suspended these apps while we investigate
Facebook's vice president of product partnerships, Ime Archibong
"We take these allegations very seriously, and have suspended these apps while we investigate."
Based on the investigation to date, Facebook said Crimson Hexagon had not obtained any Facebook or Instagram information inappropriately.
Crimson Hexagon did not respond to requests for comment on Friday evening, but in a statement to Bloomberg had said: "Crimson Hexagon is fully cooperating with Facebook who has publicly states its investigation to date has found no wrongdoing."
News of the investigation is, however, likely to prompt some concern, given the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which it emerged that data from around 87 million Facebook users had been scraped via a quiz app and later used by a political consultancy firm.
Facebook has come under heavy scrutiny for the data leak, and is currently under investigation by regulators across the world, including the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and EU lawmakers.
Earlier this month, it was handed the maximum penalty by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office of £500,000 which found Facebook had failed to protect users' information.
Since the crisis, it has suspended more than 200 apps which could access Facebook data.