Why you shouldn’t take a Facebook quiz
Hello and welcome back to our newsletter. Today we are going to look into the quizzes you find on Facebook and why you shouldn’t participate in them.
We all know those quizzes on Facebook that either tell you the “kind of princess you are”, or how “good of a friend you are” and so on. These quizzes have interesting titles made especially to attract users and make them participate. But these quizzes are in fact short psychological questionnaires built by industry experts, and used to create psychological profiles of ideal customers/users for a specific company and/or person.
These companies that make these quizzes, sell the information and their research results to other organisations that profit from them and manipulate people online into buying, inspire to do things users won’t usually do, or even change the course of a country.
Since you have a bit of an introduction on the topic, let’s dig a little bit deeper, and talk about Cambridge Analytica, and how they influenced at least 2 whole countries up until 2016 (after the US presidential election).
Cambridge Analytica, part of SCL Group, was founded to do exactly this, research. And what is the best platform to this kind of psychological research on a large scale? Short answer, Facebook. Cambridge Analytica designed small quizzes online for people to participate, where they told users at the end their type of personality or other “interesting” facts about them. This way they gathered sensitive data of thousands of people all around the world, and then used that information against the population.
In Netflix’s documentary, “The Great Hack”, it was clearly stated what Cambridge Analytica did. For example, they gathered data on 500,000 users from India, and used that information to manipulate the election from 2010, which gave INC an easy win.
Cambridge Analytica started and tested their system in multiple countries all over the world, including Kenya, Malta, Mexico, and after they started having steady and predicable results, they got involved in the US election in 2016, when they helped current president Donald Trump win the office. It is said that the organisation gathered and used the data from 70,000 Facebook users, created an ideal psychological profile, and then bombarded that type of person with all types of Facebook ads, which manipulated them and turned voters towards Trump. At some point in the election, Cambridge Analytica spent over $1million per day on Facebook ads. At the end, we all know what happened and what were the results.
In the same documentary, “The Great Hack”, it is presented that Cambridge Analytica also got involved in the Brexit campaign, and helped the Conservative Party win the general election in 2016.
Now that we have discussed about what can happen with your data if you participate in a quiz on any social media platform, maybe it’s time to think twice before doing it.
If you already participated, don’t worry, it’s not too late. You can always take back control over your data, and request any company to send you a copy of your data. This way you can see what they know about you and also what they do with all that data, as well as with whom they share it with. After this, you can either ask them to stop sharing it, to stop processing it for marketing purposes, or even ask them to delete all of it.
If you wish to exercise any of your privacy rights, do not hesitate to contact us, and we will help you every step of the way.
Contact: contact@find-my-data.com
Thank you, and remember to #KeepItPrivate