Our final segment of the Most Clicked, Shared and Talked About APIs of 2018 focuses on Security and Privacy APIs. Some sub-categories covered in this article include Validation, Authentication, Hacking, Recognition, Safety, Emergency, Identity and verification.
Perhaps as a result of a near blind faith in the API Economy, the Security and Privacy sectors this year suffered a number of breaches and attacks caused by API vulnerabilities. Victims included customers and users of T-Mobile, Docker, Twitter, Spotify, Venmo, GitLab, Panera, Grindr, OKCupid, United States Postal Service, Google/Android, the RSA Conference, and LocationSmart.
But any year-end round-up about Security and Privacy APIs cannot be complete without mentioning the privacy breach elephant in the room: the Facebook/Cambridge Analytics political scandal. While it’s very existence as a “social network” should have clued users in to the fact that it isn’t exactly “private”, Facebook faced a tremendous amount of backlash for enabling Cambridge Analytics to sneakily harvest data from 87 million Facebook members via data mining, 3rd party apps and weak API permissions. The company responded by making drastic changes…