Quizzes, quizzes, and more quizzes.  They are everywhere on Facebook.  You can’t scan your news feed and not find out if someone knows their 80’s hair band lyrics, if  they were raised in church, or if they know when they are going to die?
While most people find these quizzes fun, entertaining, and amusing, it turns out there they could be sharing a lot more of your Facebook profile information with the creators of the quiz than you might realize.
How much more? Almost everything in your profile: your religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups.
Facebook quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends‘ profiles. So if your friend takes a quiz, they could be giving away your personal information too.
Think I am being over cautious? Â Take this quiz and find out. Â The ACLU of Northern CA has created a quiz to show Facebook users how much of their information is being shared. Â They state they have a privacy policy and strictly adhere to the policy.
Has this freaked you out enough that you don’t want to take this quiz or any other now? Â Here is the questions, the answers, and additional information from this quiz. It is the only quiz I’ve ever taken on Facebook:
QUESTION 1: When you take a quiz on Facebook, what can the quiz see about you?
Answer: Almost everything on your profile, even if you use privacy settings to limit access.
QUESTION 2: What info about you can a quiz see when your friends take a quiz?
Answer: Almost everything on your profile, even if you use privacy settings to limit who can see that information.
QUESTION 3: There must be safeguards somewhere, right? My information is safe because:
Answer: None of the above – and that’s a problem.
QUESTION 4: OK, that sounds like a real problem. So what should I do?
Answer: Demand the right to control my information without sacrificing the right to use new technology.
Additional information (include from the quiz):
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?
What’s going on with these quizzes just isn’t right. It’s time for Facebook to upgrade its privacy controls so that you decide who gets to see your personal information.
That’s where you come in. As we’ve seen before, Facebook does respond when users protest. So we need to make some noise!
- Update your own privacy settings.
- Share this quiz on Facebook and encourage your friends to take it!
- And Sign our online petition and tell Facebook that you want more control of your own information.
Don’t let Facebook’s default settings force you to silently pay with your privacy when you (or your friends!) use Facebook. Demand that Facebook upgrade its privacy controls to give you control of your personal info. Demand Your dotRights!
Feel free to share this with anyone and everyone you know. Â If you are reading this on Facebook, it is also linked on my blog at: http://www.nealbreeding.com/blogs/?p=326