Here Comes Facebook’s Annual Apps Fest. There’s Just One Problem

Almost every year for a decade, Facebook Inc. has gathered makers of all sorts of apps, games, and advertising tools at its F8 conference to explain how much better their businesses could be by forming a partnership with the company to make them more social. The event generally had a celebratory vibe, starting with applause for Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s product introductions and ending with a performance by a popular musical artist.

The 2018 conference, which kicks off on May 1 in San Jose, Calif., is shaping up to be a lot less festive. Facebook finds itself in a crisis of public trust after a developer shared the personal data of as many as 87 million people with Cambridge Analytica, a conservative political consulting company. Facebook said it would quickly address the problem—though it can’t retrieve the data that was leaked—while admitting there could be many similarly sized data security problems involving other developers it doesn’t yet know about.