Much like Nigerian spammers purposely including spelling errors in their emails to trap “dumb” people —the quizzes on Facebook about “Which Star Wars character are you?” are there just to get you to authorize them. Then they go harvest your data. The authorization is built into the terms of service when you take the test.
So don’t take any Facebook quizzes, surveys, or tests — EVER.
The aspect of this story that ought to be of most concern to Facebook members is that once I have authorized someone to use my Facebook data I have authorized them to use not only my data but also that of all my Facebook friends!
As of this morning I have 2,980 Facebook friends. If I was stupid enough to authorize the release of my data I’d be authorizing the release of all the data on 2,980 other people, too. Now maybe I have more Facebook connections than most people, but you can see how getting only a few thousand survey responses can yield hundreds of thousands of records.
I’m told the average active Facebook member has 250 friends, so one person signing up is like getting 250 full and complete profiles. It’s such a broken system with no way to ever opt out.
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
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