Facebook Officially Ban Personality Quizzes

Personality quizzes have been a great way to gather and store users’ personal information for many years. However, Facebook recently announced that it would prohibit this kind of data harvesting. This news is a year apart from the Cambridge Analytica scandal which revealed that the company had had personal information of about 87 million via a quiz called “thisisyourdigitallife.”

The problem here is, at the core, personality quizzes are not bad; the way people handle the information is what raises concern. To do these quizzes, people have to expose some of the data on themselves to the quiz, or in other words, to the developers that made the quizzes. Facebook failed to implement a proper policy to ensure that developers, who have access to the information, would treat it in the way to protect the privacy of the users who had handed them over as well as to check if the developers only use them for proper causes. When one user commits to the quiz, their friends and even friends of friends are at risk also.

This move is just a small portion of what Facebook intends to do to stricken the regulation on what developers can do and get their hands on. One of the other measures includes blocking APIs that allow the use of users’ data. This solution will also prohibit developers from harvesting newer data if there is no sign of activity of that person on the app in the last 90 days.

Some of the measures which are introduced over a year ago will come into effect soon, for example, the above 90-day restriction. Of course, Facebook will not say straight out that the ban on personality quiz is because of the Cambridge Analytica. Instead, it announced that the cause was to delete apps with not much of use from the platform.