Beware the Facebook Quiz

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Taking facebook quizzes and posting your results for the world (or at least your network of friends) from "What Sex and the City Character Are You?" or "What is Your Vampire Power?" is more just incredibly lame. It's also risky, according to the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

"Millions of people on Facebook who use third-party applications on the site, including the popular quizzes, do not realize the extent to which developers of quizzes and other applications have access to personal information. Facebook defaults privacy settings allow nearly unfettered to user's profile information, including religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, photos, events, notes, wall posts and groups," the ACLU warns.

The ACLU thinks Facebook should be doing more to protect its users and suggests that the social networking site upgrade its privacy controls so that quizzes can only see what people want them to see. One way to do this, the ACLU says, is to make the process for apps to access a user's friends data opt-in rather than opt-out.