Millions might have ended up victims of Facebook app
25 Nov 2015
A viral app is able to steal all of people's personal information and can sell it on to whoever it wants, it has emerged. The app, which takes the form of a quiz called Most Used Words on Facebook, had been shared thousands of times but might be taking the information of those who used it.
According to commentators, the quiz was only one of a huge number of Facebook apps that were luring people with interesting information or quizzes. The apps then request access to users' information and Facebook page before they give up what they were offering and then selling the data they gathered.
The Most Used Words on Facebook app is mostly seen when a user posts the word clouds that it generated. It pulls information from users' statuses and finds the words that users used most, assembling them into a picture that showed the most common ones largest.
The app had been shared over 16 million times, according to Comparitech, which was the first to report the privacy issues. "That's over 16 million people who agreed to give up almost every private detail about themselves to a company they likely know nothing about," the site wrote.
According to Comparitech, the app was a ''privacy nightmare.'' In the quiz, created by a company called Vonvon.me, it required users to give up almost every private detail about themselves.
Comparitech added, the information could be stored anywhere in the world, so personal data could end up without the protection afforded by US policies.
''And it's theirs not just for today, but in the case of Vonvon, they can use it forever,'' Ray Hutchins, President of Denver Cyber Security, told CBS4. ''You don't know where that information is going to be stored. You don't know how it's going to be used. You don't know who they might sell it to and they have full permission to sell it to anyone and do anything with it that they want to,'' denver.cbslocal.com reported.
