(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Almost every year for a decade, Facebook Inc. has gathered makers of all sorts of apps, games, and advertising tools at its F8 conference to explain how much better their businesses could be by forming a partnership with the company to make them more social. The event generally had a celebratory vibe, starting with applause for Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s product introductions and ending with a performance by a popular musical artist.
The 2018 conference, which kicks off on May 1 in San Jose, Calif., is shaping up to be a lot less festive. Facebook finds itself in a crisis of public trust after a developer shared the personal data of as many as 87 million people with Cambridge Analytica, a conservative political consulting company. Facebook said it would quickly address the problem—though it can’t retrieve the data that was leaked—while admitting there could be many similarly sized data security problems involving other developers it doesn’t yet know about.
When Facebook opened up its platform to third-party developers in 2007, it helped drive hundreds of millions of new users to the social network. The arrangement has grown into a codependent relationship in which apps and websites personalize their offerings using Facebook user data, and Facebook gains more visibility into its users’ behavior beyond its own site.
Security fixes announced over the past several weeks include pausing the approval process for new applications and restricting some of the data developers get from Facebook for logging into apps as well as Facebook Groups, Pages, Events, and Instagram.
Developers say such measures are unfair and unnecessarily punitive, holding their businesses accountable for Facebook’s own lax policies. “Facebook needs to really simplify and clarify the way they use and protect data and allow developers to deal directly with their audience,” says Andrea D’Ottavio, the founder of Webing Ltd., an app developer. Panicked messages posted on the Facebook developers blog in recent weeks reveal deep anxiety about how long the freeze on app approvals will last. “You really, absolutely must give us an ETA,” Benjamin Ritter, a web designer at a company called Firecracker Software LLC, wrote in early April, warning that Facebook will lose developers’ trust if the delay continues indefinitely.
“We are unable to provide a specific time frame for when we will be reviewing apps for the platform again,” Facebook replied, promising to provide more detail in the coming weeks.
Apps have encouraged people to use their Facebook credentials to open accounts. Millions did so because it’s easier and doesn’t require yet another password. Soon after the Cambridge Analytica revelations, some developers noticed a drop in users signing in via Facebook. Socialive TV, a British company that sells livestreaming yoga classes, saw a 15 percent drop in Facebook logins in the two weeks after the news broke. Joseph Black and Oliver Jacobs, co-CEOs of U.K.-based student marketplace UniDosh Ltd., say new users haven’t been registering via Facebook as much. Sign-ups via UniDosh’s own login system rose about 23 percent in the three weeks ended March 29. Facebook says it hasn’t seen a decline in the use of its login system for third-party websites.
Bumble Trading Inc., a popular dating app, expanded its user base in part because it was so simple to sign up—a date was within reach just by logging into Facebook. Now the Austin-based company, which boasts 30 million users, lets people sign up with a phone number, bypassing Facebook. The move “isn’t about Bumble moving away from Facebook by any means,” says Bumble Chief Operating Officer Sarah Jones Simmer. The company had planned on this before the Cambridge Analytica reports. Still, the business remains heavily dependent on the social network, because it was the only way users had to log in since 2014.
Zuckerberg at F8 may turn the focus from security to the cool hardware that Facebook plans to start selling soon, according to a person familiar with the plans who requested anonymity because the plans are private. A $200 Oculus-branded virtual reality headset will be unveiled. But hardware also presents challenges. The company has scrapped plans to announce one of its most hotly anticipated products—a speaker assistant and video chat device for the home—in part because of the public uproar over privacy issues, people familiar with the plans have said.
Until the conference kicks off, the company is encouraging developers to fill out a complaint form. But they probably shouldn’t expect help anytime soon. “Due to the number of inquiries,” the form reads, “you may experience a delay in response.”
To contact the authors of this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.net, Nate Lanxon in London at nlanxon@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dimitra Kessenides at dkessenides1@bloomberg.net.
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