Facebook says it will no longer permit apps with minimal utility, such as personality quizzes, and will expire user permissions not used or accessed in 90 days
Eddie O'Neil / Facebook Developers :
Context & Ripple Effects
This policy lands a year into Facebook's post-Cambridge Analytica cleanup: the company began with an audit of every app that held extended data access before 2014, followed by API-level lockdowns of Login, Pages, Events, and Groups data, and has already suspended more than 400 apps — including myPersonality, whose misuse touched millions of users' data.
What changes here is the default: instead of auditing apps after misuse surfaces or revoking them one by one, Facebook is making data access perishable — 90 days of non-use kills the grant — while banning entire categories like personality quizzes outright. The category ban also echoes its earlier decision to shut down its own low-usage apps rather than carry dormant products.
First-order effects
- Quiz-style developers lose platform access entirely, while any app a user hasn't engaged with in 90 days sees its permissions silently expire — moving the burden of reauthorization onto both developers and users.
Second-order effects
- Legitimate third-party apps must now engineer engagement loops and re-permission prompts just to keep their data pipelines alive, raising the cost of staying integrated and pushing smaller developers off the platform.
Third-order effects
- Enforcement is the open question: Facebook later disclosed it kept sharing inactive users' data with around 5,000 developers even past the 90-day cut-off, so the structural shift depends less on the written policy than on whether expiry is automated rather than audited.
The trend: Platform data access is shifting from standing grants policed by retrospective audits to automatically expiring permissions controlled by the platform itself.