An Update on Our App Investigation and Audit

The government does stuff like that all the time although usually it's ~200 people over the course of a year or two, not all at once. It's something along the lines of "Whoops, looks like CPS wasn't actually doing their jobs right and we took 200 kids from otherwise not too terrible parents, well here's an official apology and a pledge to investigate this internally, don't worry we'll conclude we did nothing wrong. Maybe if we feel really guilty we'll force someone to retire a year early or something."

You can replace the above with other examples of systemic mistreatment if you want.

Sleazy utility providers and businesses with local monopoly do similar but not quite so bad things and nobody gets any recourse unless they get a check from a class action.

These kind of things typically makes the state or regional news for a day with maybe a 10sec follow up when the apology is actually issued or they find themselves innocent of wrongdoing.

When you have monopoly or near monopoly position there's less accountability and more wiggle room to behave like a jerk.

The website in question is Facebook. My bet is this didn't even go through a PR. Rather as this slowly unfolds I really doubt if Facebook even has a PR team.

"Facebook will investigate all the apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform policies in 2014"

There may not be a large number of apps that "had access to large amounts of information" before 2014.

It doesn't really indicate how far along they are in their investigation. It says they've investigated thousands of apps so far, but we don't know (from this post, at least) how many are still pending review.

Judging by their use of "thousands", I'd bet that the number is somewhere between 2000 (making 1 in 10 suspended) and 8000 (making 1 in 40 suspended).

Now if that number was out of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then the number would indeed be quite small.