Facebook's Big Showcase Wasn't for You

SAN JOSE--Every spring, Facebook throws a splashy conference for app and web developers, the barnacles of its massive online ecosystem. But this year's F8 came at a supremely awkward time: In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company has begun to scrub its depths, making life more annoying for developers whose products depend on tapping into Facebook's valuable deposits of user data. For years, in fact, access to that data was one way Facebook lured developers into working with the platform. In recent weeks, Facebook has limited developers' access to data on Facebook events and guest lists plus users' login information, religious affiliation, relationship status, work history, call and text history, and more. That's meant that a company with an app that, say, syncs groups invitations with Facebook events, like a gift registry, or that links Facebook friend information to its own users whether they have acquaintances in common, like dating apps, could be forced to rejigger chunks of their business model or at least ask their users to agree to new privacy conditions and get new approvals from Facebook.