Are they actually pretending that they give any credence to the personal information that a Facebook app could access? Back years before Facebooks IPO a profess

Are they actually pretending that they give any credence to the personal information that a Facebook app could access? Back years before Facebooks IPO a professor I worked with had an idea to study social networks using Facebook as a dataset. They would make an App that would collect personal data and create conclusions. She looked into what Facebook collected and promptly stopped the data collection system. From my understanding any App that integrates with the Facebook platform has a large amount of data that can be mined. I think they started restricting this but still if you let an app attach to your profile all sorts of wondrous things can be found out