Facebook kills API ecosystem to give users better privacy

After much speculation, today Facebook has confirmed around 300 000 Australian accounts, mostly from Australian’s living overseas, may have had their data exposed in the Cambridge Analytica saga that has been unfolding.

But perhaps the bigger news is that Facebook is making sweeping changes to it’s API services for third party developers, reducing limits for queries, revoking access and requiring more stringent reviews by Facebook. They’ve also retired their legacy Instagram API.

While many of these changes will be largely unnoticed by the majority of users, we’ve used and relied on these API’s in the past for media walls at events and conferences, so it will be interesting to see what becomes possible for these events and methods of social interaction in the future.

Many of the third party tools and app’s, third party login services and others may be affected by these changes to Facebook and Instagram – but it’s all for better privacy.

Read more at the Tech Crunch article which summarises the changes.