25 October

Apps or games you once signed in to with your Facebook account may still hold data they took from it at the time. On 25 October 2018, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO, the regulator responsible for data protection) announced a £500,000 fine on Facebook, and its press release states that between 2007 and 2014 Facebook let app developers obtain users' data without sufficiently clear and informed consent, including the data of people who had not installed an app but were friends of someone who had. Facebook appealed and agreed in the 2019 settlement to pay the fine without admitting liability, saying, in the ICO's 2019 statement on the settlement, that it should have done more in 2015 to investigate claims about the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica and had by then significantly restricted the information app developers could access. In April 2018, Facebook put the maximum at 87 million people, mostly in the US, whose information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, and its chart of the ten countries with the most people whose information may have been shared includes the Philippines (1,175,870), Indonesia (1,096,666), India (562,455) and Vietnam (427,446), while Marketing-Interactive reported a figure from Facebook of potentially 65,009 for Singapore. Facebook's Help Center (checked in October 2026) shows that on a computer you can remove an app under Settings & privacy > Settings > Apps and websites, though the app may still have information it stored earlier.