Mar 11, 2019
Facebook sues over 'data-grabbing' quizzes
Malicious quiz apps were used to harvest thousands of users' profile data, according to Facebook. The quizzes, with titles such as "What does your eye colour say about you?" and "Do people love you for your intelligence or your beauty?", gained access to this information via the Facebook Login system - which enables connections between third party apps and Facebook profiles. While the system is intended to verify that such connections are secure, in this case, Facebook says, users were falsely told the app would retrieve only a limited amount of public data from their profiles. "In total, defendants compromised approximately 63,000 browsers used by Facebook users and caused over $75,000 in damages to Facebook," the company said in court documents first published by online news site The Daily Beast. Rew Dwyer, a cyber-security expert at the University of Oxford, said the court document suggested users who installed the browser extensions had "Effectively opened up entry into their Facebook accounts".
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