Most Facebook users don’t really care about the potential risks of Facebook quizzes that can collect and store the answers they give when they’re taking the quizzes; they also cannot stop these kinds of quizzes from collecting the information in their profiles – and even information from their friends’ profiles.

In order to prove the above risks come not as a total surprise, the ACLU of Northern California has developed a Facebook quiz of its own to illustrate how quizzes that may seem “perfectly harmless” can access to a wide array of your personal information, though in the first place, you’re wondering the Facebook policies has always in place to reassure the protection of user data.

The Facebook app, i.e. a quiz entitled, “What Do Facebook Quizzes Know About You?” delivers its answer by showing you how much do the quizzes you take really learn about you on Facebook.

According to ACLU, more than 8,000 participants have taken this quiz since it was quietly released a few days ago. In addition, the group hopes to prompt Facebook to upgrade its privacy default settings for its users, now amounting more than 250 million.

Chris Conley, a technology fellow with the ACLU, finds a probable reason for developing this Facebook quiz, said “We wanted to use Facebook itself to show how all these quiz creators have access to personal information. It is difficult to know how third-party app developers use the data, which can be collected and sold for marketing and advertising campaigns. Private investigators and political entities are known to create dossiers using technologies that automatically scour the Web. An individual bombarded by spam, for example, may have been targeted because of an affiliation posted on Facebook. There is no way to know.”

However, ACLU acknowledged the irony of its approach: “We know it’s a little weird to warn you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz – but at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we’re committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?”

To know more about the generic quiz results and what are the comments of ACLU toward it, there is an explanation page posted by ACLU.

Tagged as: ,