Facebook Quizzes

In the article, Facebook quizzes: What happens to your data?, Jane Wakefield discusses a “privacy nightmare” that was created by a Facebook app that accessed your Facebook data in order to create a word-cloud of the your used words. The data accessed by Vonvon, the creators of the app, included “name, profile picture, age, sex, birthday, entire friend list, everything you have posted on your timeline, all of your photos, home town, education history and everything you have ever liked.” While this app was hugely popular, it was not even in Vonvon’s top list of most popular apps, which includes an app to scour through yours and others’ Facebook data to find your soul-mate. According to a chief executive of Vonvon, "We(Vonvon) only use your information to generate your results, and we never store it for other purposes,"  while this seems like a happy notion it is likely untrue. "It is hard to believe that these apps are collecting data just to make better quizzes," he told the BBC. "Especially when their privacy policies go into so much detail about how they may use personally identifiable data" said Paul Bischoff, a freelance journalist. Wakefield also finds it puzzling how we allow some companies to access our personal data without complaint but gripe when others company due, which blurs the distinction of what is acceptable. In the end he points to the advice of security expert Lisa Vaas who says that although it may be fun to find out which fictional character you are or who your soul-mate is, it’s not worth trading your personal information for.