Every Facebook user must have taken personality testing quizzes that ask them to answer few questions and in turn, promise them to tell who they are. Very often they also claim to reveal about user’s soul mates, best friends and their role as a superhero. It is evident that their answers are not even near to reality and prove nothing entertainment. But, the sad part is, their actions inevitably ring an alarm. Yes, these personality testing apps, access the Facebook data and one never knows what purpose they might be using it for.
The recent case of privacy breach emerged in the form of Cambridge Analytica, the US firm that harvested the Facebook users’ data to run a targeted campaign for President Trump in US elections.
How Cambridge Analytica Exploited Users’ Data
According to The Guardian report Cambridge Analytica that was headed by the Donald Trump’s key advisor Steve Bannon in 2014 accessed the Facebook data of millions of users without authorization and profiled the American voters for targeted advertisement.
The reports say that company used an app thisisyourdigitallife that paid users for accessing their data in return for taking a personality quiz. But, the app indirectly got access to the data of users’ friends and thus managed to gather a data pool of millions of users.
How to Diagnose Such Apps
On social media websites like Facebook, users share very sensitive data that includes their personal information, relationship secrets, opinions, photographs and much more. To prevent Facebook data from going into wrong hands, a user must beware of apps that might be accessing the personal information for no reason.
How to Detect the Stealer Apps
Now, seeing this risk may compel you to get rid of Facebook addiction. But wait as there is another way. You can also detect and then remove these apps and here is how,
Well, the process of detecting the spy apps is much more straightforward. One just needs to click on setting and then apps tab on the left bar. As a result of this, all those apps that use the Facebook data show up. From here users can see which apps are necessary to keep and which of them are useless and might be taking exploiting Facebook data.
For example, there can be apps like Amazon, LinkedIn or Instagram that might be using data to log in them on other platforms. But, the apps whose publishers are not and known who seem to be there for no reason other than getting data must be removed. For a Facebook user, it is no difficult to detect the apps that might be silently spying on personal information.
