Facebook announces ‘Data Abuse Bounty’ program with up to $40,000 rewards


Facebook

Facebook today has announced a new ‘Data Abuse Bounty’ program to reward people who report any misuse of data by app developers. Facebook aims to quickly uncover potential abuse of users information and it says that the new Data Abuse Bounty is inspired by the existing bug bounty program that we use to uncover and address security issues. 

This program will reward people with first-hand knowledge and proof of cases where a Facebook platform app collects and transfers people’s data to another party that uses the data to sell, steal, uses for a scam or political influence. Much like the other bounty programs, Facebook will reward based on the impact of each report. The high impact bug reports can garn as much as $40,000.

Facebook will review all legitimate reports and respond when it identifies a credible threat to users information. Once it is able to confirm the data abuse, it will shut down the offending app and take legal action against the company selling or buying the data. Facebook also said that it will alert those we believe to be affected. To be eligible for the program, the app related to the bug should have more than 10,000 Facebook users, should have definitive abuse of data, and something that Facebook isn’t actively investigating.

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