facebook Quizzes Could Access Your Info

WASHINGTON - Admit it! If you're on facebook, you've probably taken one or two of those quizzes.

Like which Simpson characters are you most like? Or what's your personality profile? But the fun past-time could be exposing your personal information to people you don't know.

Every time you log onto facebook, it seems one of those interesting quizzes is tempting you to try it. Even if you resist, chances are some of your friends have taken them. It seems innocent enough. Maybe you do want to know what superhero your dog most resembles.

But before you click, ask yourself "is that quiz putting you at risk?"

"It really is the wild west out there in the internet," says Jay Stanley with the American Civil Liberties Union. And according to the ALCU, it is.

"The concern here is when you take a facebook quiz it exposes not only a lot of your own personal information that's on your site to the sponsor of the quiz, but also your friends information," says Stanley.

Access granted by simply clicking on that "allow" key to download third party applications.

Your profile stats, posts and pictures all in the hands of people you don't know says security expert Jean-Paul Boucher.

"All of that information is part of that license agreement people simply check off on and that's how they get access," says Boucher.

Boucher says while facebook does not sell your information, there's no way to know what the third parties do with it.

"They can sell it to the highest bidder for whatever purpose," says Boucher.

That opens you up to spam, marketing tools or worse case scenario, identity theft.

"Once a company has your personal information there's really no legal limits on what they can do with it
unless they have promised not to do something with it," says ACLU's Jay Walker.

The ACLU came up with - ironically - a quiz to show just how much of your private information could be getting out. We had three college students sign up. All believed their facebook profiles were locked up tight.

Oh my gosh, yeah they can see everything," says one American University senior.

"My thing is unsearchable but the fact is they could get all this information."

Each time you answer a question, the quiz reveals what third parties can see about you and your friends.

"This girl is my friend from high school and this is another fraternity on campus, this girl I haven't talked to since freshman year."

But there is a way to close the door on your life to third parties. Facebook says you can block applications just as you block individuals. It's just not a page our college student had ever seen called "application settings."

If you have a facebook profile, you can go through and list out all of your security settings including ones about allowing other applications to have access to your profile information.

For its part, facebook says it's developing new ways to provide more privacy control and conducts spots reviews of top applications.

"facebook is dealing with the privacy questions but we need to keep the pressure on and keep reminding them that people care," says Stanley

Because who knew taking a quiz could reveal so much about who you really are.

Close to 100,000 people have taken the ACLU quiz.

To take it yourself and learn how to protect your information on social networking sites click here. 
http://www.aclu.org/blog/content/quiz-what-do-facebook-quizzes-know-about-you

You can also see what facebook says its doing to improve privacy here:
http://www.facebook.com/security