It’s impossible to open social media these days without stumbling upon yet another quiz or personality test. While it might be fun to find out which character is your One Battle after Another alter-ego, getting your data trumps providing entertainment value.
How do online quizzes and games go about this? What data is on the line? Most importantly, what can you do to keep it from leaking while still indulging in brain-teasing pursuits? Here’s everything you need to know to stay safe.
How Data Gathering Works
Quizzes and games gather data in layers. Even accessing one means they might find out a lot about you if you sign in through social media. Depending on the type of permissions they ask for, they might become privy to your profile information, friend lists, and more.
Data gathering is also a core part of the quizzes themselves. Your interests, opinions, and preferences are all valuable data points that can be used for targeted ads or sold to third parties.
Sometimes, a quiz will ask you to sign up for a newsletter or fill out a form to get the results. At the very least, you’re exposing your email address. However, some in-depth survey-style quizzes might ask for more personal information.
Data gets collected even if the quiz doesn’t do so visibly. You might need to consent to third-party cookies before playing in a browser, which tracks your behavior across websites. They may also run scripts in the background that use info like your hardware and browser version to create and track your unique device fingerprint.
How Is This Data Used?
While not all uses of data quizzes and games are outright harmful, they raise privacy and security concerns.
Targeted and personalized ads are most common. For example, you take a travel destination quiz and answer that you’d like to visit London. Suddenly, ads on different websites start featuring discount flights to the UK or luggage, since they’re all part of the same ad network.
Collected data may also be sold to third parties, like data brokers. These can combine your info and answers with others’ to create bulk profiles and sell them on. Your data may then reach not just more advertisers, but insurance companies, credit agencies, and political campaigns.
Training AI models on quiz answers and in-game patterns is another widespread use case. The more preferences they gather, the better AIs become at recommending products or predicting behavior.
Of course, there’s also a chance for abuse. Knowing more about you and your preferences can help cybercrooks answer security questions or guess passwords to gain access to your accounts.
Keeping Your Online Privacy Safe
Online quizzes and games are fun, and you shouldn’t avoid them entirely. However, you’ll want to understand what you’re getting yourself into and protect yourself appropriately.
For example, using a disposable email rather than signing in through social media or Google will prevent your real email address, contacts, and friends from getting exposed. Even then, be suspicious of permission requests and grant as few as possible.
Don’t answer invasive questions when doing quizzes. Trivia and vague personality questions are fine, but think twice before sharing information on your health, demographics, beliefs, or finances.
You can limit metadata games and quizzes tend to gather by using a gaming VPN. It will hide your real IP address and location, which makes tracking and profiling harder.
You can act even if you suspect that your information might have been leaked. Threat protection services monitor data breaches and dark web activity. They’ll provide instant alerts if key info like your ID, credit card numbers, etc., surfaces and help you take steps to recover your identity.
Conclusion
Your online quiz answers might seem harmless, but the intent behind collecting them isn’t. Staying safe means being smart, and now you know just what to do.
