Facebook Quizzes and Hackers

It seems about everyday I see somebody post the results of a Facebook quiz.  I was going over my Facebook feed with coffee in hand...poof, I saw the results of three quiz results. 

Just a little heads up, it’s not the quiz results that anybody wants.  It’s your personal data and sometimes the data of your friends list.  Some of the quizzes and games have prompts so that when you interact with the either, it installs browser extensions. 

Remember Cambridge Analytica?  I would of thought that would been enough of a warning for most people. 

When a new quiz pops up, I see an up tick of hacked accounts on my news feed. Technology has made it easier and easier for your private data to be accessed by unauthorized parties.

Why does this concern me?  It’s not always the person’s data who’s taking those quizzes. If you are on my news feed, sometimes it’s also me. In 2010, Facebook launched an API called Open Graph and that was blocked by Facebook in 2018.   Now hackers use Facebook and online quizzes to obtain data for identity theft. That API is blocked but I'm not 100% sure that there's not a work around by now. I'm not the trusting kind. 

There’s a lot of people that are peeved with Facebook because of the last data leak in 2019. 267 million people had their phone numbers shared on an online hackers’ forum.  The flip side is that if you use social media or use the internet in any of its various functions, don’t make it easy for people to collect your data.

Most cyber security experts caution people using third-party apps. So why do people keep doing it? 

Sharing isn’t always caring…

That's my thought for today.