SAN FRANCISCO—More than 8,000 people have taken the ACLU of Northern California's (ACLU-NC) Facebook privacy quiz, which illustrates just how much personal information the social networking site's ubiquitous quizzes can access and what users can do about it. The ACLU-NC quiz utilizes Facebook to show users how most of their personal information can be exposed even if one of their friends, rather than the user, takes a Facebook quiz. Technology and civil liberties experts at ACLU-NC called on Facebook to improve its privacy controls and default settings. (Quiz: http://apps.facebook.com/aclunc_privacy_quiz/.)

Millions of people on Facebook who use third party applications on the site, including the popular quizzes, do not realize the extent to which developers of quizzes and other applications have access to personal information. Facebook's default privacy settings allow nearly unfettered access to a user's profile information, including religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, photos, events, notes, wall posts, and groups. 

Regardless of whether a user's Facebook profile is “private,” by taking a quiz the user allows its developer to gain access to the user's profile information. The impact even extends to users who have never taken a quiz. By Facebook default, every time one of a user's friends takes a quiz, the quiz has access to that user's profile information.

“It's time for Facebook to upgrade its privacy controls so that quizzes can only see what people want them to see,” said Chris Conley, Technology and Civil Liberties Fellow at the ACLU of Northern California. “Users need stronger protections than Facebook currently provides.”

The ACLU-NC quiz utilizes Facebook itself to illustrate how these quizzes and other third party applications can access a range of information about a user and their friends. The quiz concludes with a link to where users can change their privacy settings to better control how their information is shared by third party applications, and directs to a petition to demand stronger privacy protections from Facebook. The quiz is a project of ACLU-NC's dotRights campaign.

ACLU-NC's recommendations to Facebook include:

• Change default privacy settings so that quizzes and other third party applications run by a user's friends do not have access the information on a user's profile without the user's opt-in consent.
• Simplify and improve privacy controls to give users the ability to decide what personal information gets shared with friends and others through Facebook.
• Require that third party applications like quizzes list the categories of user data they will access and allow users to view this list. Prevent applications from having access to information that has not been listed, and notify users if an application's data categories change before allowing access to this additional information.

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