Of Facebook Quizzes, Sharing Data, And Saying Goodbye To Privacy

Aside from using Facebook for connecting to love ones, friends or acquaintances, users also log-in to read posted articles, watch shared videos and avoid boredom by playing games or using third party apps that can be found at site.

One of the most common ways to entertain users, next only to playing games, are answering quizzes of different kinds and origins. These quizzes can be just about anything that one can think of. Recently, one of these quizzes have gained quite an audience. Facebook's "that Cloud Quiz", from the company Vonvon, became so popular that it has already gathered over 16 million quiz takers.

Once you attempt to take the quiz, a message will pop-up asking for permission to give Vonvon access to the following: the user's public name, profile pictures and other info, all posts made by the user, their entire friend list, uploaded and tagged photos; everything that the user liked, their IP address, info on the user's device and pretty much everything on the user's profile, public or otherwise.

This permission warning might be pretty common for third party apps, but most of them don't need to access as much info as this quiz does. The company claims that the following information would be used for infographics and other things.

However it could be quite alarming, because by doing so, the user has practically waived their privacy on their Facebook profiles as well as all the data about them to Vonvon, the quiz maker. If it doesn't seem as bad as one might think, bear in mind that the user's data is now practically co-owned by the company.

The company can use it not only for infographics, as they claim, but for other things as well. They can sell the user's information to companies that need and collect different user profiles for their own nefarious purposes.

Once the permission is given, the user cannot retrieve the info once they have already been sold. They also can't ask Vonvon to remove records of their info as they have already signed an agreement or accepted the privacy policy.

The only thing that users can do if they want to keep their privacy and personal information to themselves and to people they really know, is to be mindfull in the future. Before clicking and trying any trending app or quiz, users should check the privacy policy and what info each app will access and how it affects their device or profile.