Social Media Quizzes: The Best Answer is No

​There’s a social media quiz to tempt everyone. Want to know your Harry Potter character? Find out if you have the perfect mate? Test your IQ or trivia knowledge? It turns out that many of those fun little quizzes are really designed to increase someone else’s knowledge about you, sometimes including personal information that could be used for identity fraud. To protect your privacy, you may want to avoid online quizzes. Here’s what you need to know.

​In the worst cases, criminals can use online quizzes to plant malware or steal personal information. In a recent example, Ukrainian hackers lured over 60,000 Facebook users to take online quizzes that installed malicious extensions in their browsers. The data-scraping extensions then secretly sent those users’ profile information and friends lists to the hackers. Information like this often becomes fodder for further crime such as phishing campaigns or impersonating people in online scams. In another case, a survey about concert attendance was used to gather answers to common security questions used for financial and other accounts.

​Even legitimate quizzes often gather information that can be used to barrage users with targeted advertising. Next time you see a popup or banner ad for a social media quiz, look at the fine print. They typically say that by participating, you are agreeing to the social media site’s terms of use. If you follow the link and read the terms of use, you’ll find that by using third-party apps or visiting third-party websites, you are granting access to your profile, your friends list, and other information that is then governed by that third party’s terms of use. In other words, you have no visibility or control over how that information is used or misused.

The best way to avoid this kind of privacy threat is to not participate in quizzes or download free apps advertised on social media. If you decide you just have to know your house at Hogwarts, at least read the fine print on the social media site’s terms of use, and try to visit the site of whoever is behind the quiz or survey to find out what they will do with the information. If you can’t tell or if it looks the least bit sketchy, resist the quizzical urge.

No matter what you do on social media, protect your privacy with these tips:

• Don’t put personal details on your social media profiles. Just because they ask for information doesn’t mean you have to supply it.
• Check your privacy settings regularly, and make sure only friends can see your posts.
• Review your activity log and edit posts you’ve been tagged in, in case friends unknowingly grant too much access to your information.
• Enable two-factor authentication for your account login if available. You can use the fingerprint or facial recognition on your smartphone, and some laptops now have fingerprint recognition.
• Activate SocialSentry^TM, our social media privacy and fraud protection service for Premier members, alerts you to things like account impersonations and fraudulent links.

​Remember, you don’t need a social media quiz to tell you you’re smart. As your grandmother or any Ravenclaw from Hogwarts would tell you, “smart is as smart does,” and protecting your privacy is a wise thing to do.