Why Shouldn't You Take Facebook Quizzes
Since Facebook was launched, it has undergone a lot of changes that helped ease its users’ everyday activities. It has added features for better communication, seamless photo and video sharing, as well as other entertaining activities that no other social media platform has provided.
If you spend a lot of time scrolling through your Facebook feed, then you have definitely come across a lot of Facebook quizzes like who is your celebrity look-alike, who is your true soulmate, which movie line best describes your life, what kind of pizza are you and a whole lot more.
Sure, these quizzes are definitely inviting. Just by looking at it, it seems that it brings no harm— just pure fun. But behind these creatively formulated quizzes are horrifying facts that you wouldn’t definitely want to be involved in.
In some cases, when you click on a certain Facebook quiz, you will be asked to input your full name, your birthday, or some form of security questions like your mother’s maiden name. There are also some instances where you would be required to provide access to your phone contacts or photo gallery. Now, if you don’t think of that as something shady, I don’t know what is.
If you think that taking these Facebook quizzes are essentially harmless because it’s free, then you are in for a big risk. Sure, you may not be paying them money to show you what kind of person you are based on your eye color but taking these quizzes is definitely not for free. In fact, you are paying by providing them with your personal details in exchange for some ridiculous quiz results.
While we cannot blame someone for simply wanting to have fun on Facebook by getting into these weirdly entertaining quizzes, we shouldn’t also be taking our online security for granted. Just imagine risking all of your personal details just to know what princess name suits your personality. It’s just not worth it.
Additionally, if you are a rookie when it comes to online privacy settings and systems, you would likely to just mindlessly click “allow” to these third-party apps linked to the Facebook quiz that you’re taking not knowing that you are giving the quiz developers access to more of your personal information even without you directly giving it to them.
For instance, there’s this game that quiz developers have created and made viral where you will share on your wall the 10 concerts you have ever been to and your friends will have to guess which one is a lie.
Now, if you have ever chosen “the first concert you went to” as a security question to one of your online accounts, then the hackers will only gonna have to do a trial and error from that list of yours and it wouldn’t take them more than 10 minutes to actually get inside your account.
There’s also this one Facebook user who reported that his phone randomly shut down after taking a Facebook quiz. Only later that he realized that not only his social media account was hacked but they even actually got into the devices he used for logging in.
No, we are not saying that all of the Facebook quizzes that you see on your feed are guaranteed to be a scam or a fraud, but they can potentially be one so the least that you could do is to not participate at all. However, if you still insist on taking one, here are some of the tips that you can do to avoid falling for fraud.
Do a background check. Do not easily give in to taking that quiz just because it looks fun and harmless. This is the best time to be skeptical. Check who the creator of the quiz is; is it linked to a suspicious website? Does it come from a trusted brand? Etc.
Be wary of the personal questions. As much as possible, you wouldn’t want to get involved in a Facebook quiz that requires you to input sensitive information such as your full name, address, contact number, etc. If you are gonna have to set up a security question, make sure not to provide the accurate answer to mislead the quiz developer and avoid them from using the information to hack your account.
Revisit your privacy settings and make necessary adjustments. When you engage in this kind of activity online, you are also exposing your private information. Thus, it is only essential that you check the status of your privacy settings and decide which information is accessible to whom.
When everything seems shady, do not hesitate to report. The simplest way to get rid of these suspicious activities is to have them reported and reviewed by the Facebook community. This way, not only are you protecting yourself from the possibility of getting scammed but the other users as well.
Almost everything can now be researched online, so there is no excuse for us to be naive when it comes to online activities.
Similarly, there is nothing wrong with indulging yourself on social media especially since it undoubtedly helps us in a lot of ways, but it is our responsibility as users to be aware of what we are getting into. After all, it is our own safety that we are putting on the line when we decide to not think first before we click.