Facebook announced a Data Abuse Bounty to reward people who report misuse of data by app developers, as it deals with a data mining scandal which may have impacted all 2 billion of its users.

The initiative was inspired by the existing bug bounty programme Facebook uses to uncover and address security issues, and will reward based on the impact of each report.

Facebook’s data bounty “will reward people with first-hand knowledge and proof of cases where a Facebook platform app collects and transfers people’s data to another party to be sold, stolen or used for scams or political influence,” Collin Greene, head of product security at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.

If a case of data abuse is confirmed the social media giant said it will shut down the offending app and take legal action against the company “if necessary”.

“While there is no maximum, high impact bug reports have garnered as much as $40,000 for people who bring them to our attention,” Greene said.

Last week Facebook revealed information from up to 87 million people was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, compared with news outlets’ original estimate of around 50 million.

Facebook begin notifying users who may have been affected on 9 April. A day later, CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Senate about the company’s data practices.

The Wall Street Journal reported “the 33-year-old billionaire was careful not to commit to any major changes in how the platform functions or how it sells advertising.”