I know they’re tempting. Those little facebook quizzes that tell you which Gossip Girl character you are most like, or what kind of person you attract. They’re harmless, and just for fun.
Actually, they’re not. Facebook basically gives developers the right to access all your information, and use it however they want. From the American Civil Liberties Union:
The only protection Facebook offers by default is its Terms of Service, which state that developers must collect only the information that they need and use it only in connection with Facebook.
But all it takes to be a developer is an email address, and so few of even the top developers have a privacy policy at all, it’s hard to believe that Terms of Service will hold them back if they want to collect information, and (as this quiz has shown) they can access a lot of it.
And once details about your personal life are collected by a quiz developer, who knows where they could end up or how they could be used. Shared? Sold? Turned over to the government?
Even if you’ve never taken a quiz, you’re still not safe. If a friend of yours takes a quiz, the developer can access information about their friends, which includes you.
The ACLU has a petition you can sign to Mark Zuckerburg, demanding users have more control over their provacy settings. It also has put together an educational quiz (it only takes a couple minutes) that you can take to see just how much information access these developers have.
So think twice the next time you want to find out what you were in your previous life, etc.
