Recently I, along with at least 17 million others, visited an app via Facebook which offered to provide me with a word cloud of my most used words on the social network.
When I clicked on the link, it asked for permission to access a bunch of my Facebook data and my hand hesitated over the mouse.
I’d been here before with quizzes to find out which dog I most resembled or which country best reflected my personality and decided that it was not worth swapping huge amounts of my data for an inane quiz.
But, for whatever reason, I decided on this occasion I was prepared to make that sacrifice – after all, without access to such data, how could the app discover the words I used most?
A few days later, freelance journalist Paul Bischoff wrote a piece for Comparitech entitled “That most used words Facebook quiz is a privacy nightmare” which made me sit up and reconsider my decision as it outlined the huge amounts of data that Vonvon, the South Korean company behind the quiz, hoovered up.
That personal data 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.
Interactive content firm Vonvon produces lots of quizzes and, although the “most used words” one was hugely popular, it still did not make it into its top five – which have each reached an audience of more than 50 million. The most shared of its quizzes – a game which trawls through your Facebook profile to find your soulmate – has been shared more than 120 million times.
The firm is by no means the only provider of such games – there are hundreds available via Facebook and they are proving one of the most shared bits of content on the social network.
In order to take part, users generally have to agree to allow the firm access to their Facebook data. Often the quiz won’t work without these permissions.
Vonvon’s chief executive Jonghwa Kim told the BBC that the firm uses Facebook data solely to make the quiz as good as it can be.
“We only use your information to generate your results, and we never store it for other purposes,” he told the BBC.
He also said that none of the personal information is sold on to third parties, despite this being something that it is allowed to do as part of the terms and conditions.
The terms and conditions do give Vonvon pretty free range with your data – it can, for example store information on “its servers in many countries around the world”.
Mr Kim understands that privacy is a top consideration and the firm has recently changed its Most Used Words quiz to request only public information, friends lists and timeline data.
“We do realise that some of our users are worried about their privacy protection. To accommodate these concerns proactively, we adjusted our scope of data request to the minimum requirement to produce each separate content,” Mr Kim told the BBC.
So now users who take the Most Used Words quiz will have the opportunity to edit the data they provide to Vonvon – so it just uses their timeline data and not friends lists.
Sceptical
Privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees that Vonvon seems to be taking a responsible attitude to user data.
Technologist Jeremy Gillula told Time Magazine it was acting in the most “privacy protective way” it could given the limitations of the way Facebook allows apps to work with its software.
But he added: “At the same time, people may not realise that they don’t have to do it that way, and it’s entirely possible that they could have done it another way – a less conscientious developer could have done it differently.”
Mr Bischoff remains sceptical about the motivation for the vast number of Facebook quiz apps in circulation.
“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.”
He also thinks that Facebook “is not doing enough to raise awareness”.
By Jane Wakefield
