Facebook has suspended 200 apps that harvested user data in the wake of the privacy scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that gathered data on tens of millions of Facebook users.

The social network will investigate whether these apps misused user data and will begin to alert users, in the same way it did with Cambridge Analytica's quiz app, This Is Your Digital Life, which collected the personal information of 87million users.

One of the apps reportedly exposed the details of three million users to researchers and commercial companies. The quiz app myPersonality, created by Cambridge University academics, is now being investigated by Facebook after it emerged that the data it collected easily allowed third parties to identify users and the answers they gave to intimate, psychological tests.

Facebook said it had suspended myPersonality on April 7 over concerns it had misused personal data and added that it had pored over "thousands" of apps which accessed large amounts of profile data before a policy change in 2014.

But it is still working to understand how much information each app gathered, and whether developers still hold any of this personal data.