Update: This article was revised on Nov. 25 to take into account the statements of Jonghwa Kim, CEO of Vonvon, Inc., reprinted at the end of this article.
Over 16 million of you have taken "that Cloud Quiz" on
The word you used the least? That would be "privacy."
As you clicked through to take the quiz from the company Vonvon, you agreed to their privacy policy. This is no different from the majority of Facebook quizzes. So what did you give this company that you know nothing about access to? Just:
- All your public information: name, profile picture, age, sex, birthday, etc.
- Everything you’ve ever posted on your timeline
- Your entire Friends list
- All of your photos and photos you’re tagged in
- Education history
- Hometown and current city
- Everything you’ve ever liked
- IP address
- Info about the device you’re using including browser and language
It looks fairly standard, right? Maybe not even alarming. After all, they're making an infographic out of your Facebook feed data. You'd expect them to need access to all of your posts, right?
"Why is this an issue, Anthony? Why do you hate fun?" you may be saying, while rolling your eyes and queuing up the "How Many Turkeys Can I Eat?" quiz on your phone.
I suppose if you're comfortable with giving up this much data in one go to a company you know nothing about, it wouldn't be an issue. Everyone's privacy barometer triggers at different levels.
But here's the thing, Vonvon and companies like them have long and often changing user agreements. After Comparitech broke the story yesterday, Vonvon has made it very clear that it does not store user's personal data, nor does it resell it. But did you know that? When you agreed to let them scrape your data for what they needed to create the Word Cloud or find out who's Facebook-stalking you, did you have any idea if they would be doing something with that data once the quiz was generated?
Here is the irrefutable truth: Quiz companies do not survive by giving away free stuff. They're in the business of collecting data, even if they're not selling it, even if all they're doing with it is bolstering their own algorithms to better target a market. To them, data is gold. And their strip-mine is the pool of 1 billion+ global Facebook users.
Following this post and other news stories about the Cloud Quiz, Vonvon made a concerted effort to assure everyone that the company is not storing personal data and that it is striving to make improvements to their User Agreement. I give them a lot of credit for coming forward and saying so, and you can read the email I received from Vonvon below.
But will you be ready the next time a viral quiz hits your feed? What if the next company that comes along isn't as transparent and has hidden "gotcha" clauses that let them store or resell your personal data?
I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Facebook and the companies that it indirectly supports have one resource. You. Your data is the golden calf and quiz companies live and die by leveraging whatever they can siphon from your feed. Quizzes and polls are fun and they can make Facebook a unique and enjoyable place. But make sure you know what you're really giving up before you roll over that Agree button the next time you go to take one of them. Chances are, it's a lot more than you realize. Don't be someone else's payday.
Thanks to Comparitech for breaking the original story. See below for the response from Vonvon to my original article. I have reached out to Vonvon CEO Jonghwa Kim for further comment and will update as needed.
Hello,I’m Jonghwa Kim, the CEO of vonvon, inc.Vonvon is a start-up in Korea, we’ve been around less than a year now but luckily we had good traction all over the world with more than 100M unique visitors from US, UK, France, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc. with 15 languages.Though I understand there could have been misunderstanding, I’m deeply concerned about the false accusation.1. Do we store your personal information?We only use your information to generate your results, and we never store it for other purposes. For example, in the case of the Word Cloud, the results image is generated in the user's Web browser, and the information gathered from the user's timeline to create personalized results are not even sent to our servers. Also, in the case of our quiz "What do people talk behind my back?" we use user's school and hometown so that we may pull up close friends rather than pairing random person among your 500 fb friends in the results. We use this information only to process familiarity of friends, and again, the information is never stored in our databases.2. Why do we request personal information unrelated to the Word Cloud quiz?
As mentioned above, vonvon.me creates a variety of quizzes for entertainment purposes only and leverages various user data to produce the most engaging and customized result. (** WE EMPHASIZE AGAIN WE ONLY USE USER DATA TO PRODUCE CONTENT AND NEVER SAVE THEM**) We have asked our users for a comprehensive list of access privilege so that they can enjoy our vast library of quizzes as smoothly as possible. However, we do realize that some of our users are worried about their privacy protection. To accommodate these concerns proactively,we adjusted our scope of data request to the minimum requirement to produce each separate content as of 9pm KST, Nov. 23.3. Are we selling your personal information to a third party?As we do not store any personal information, we have nothing to sell.4. About the Privacy PolicyIt’s seem like the writer taken words out of context for the sake of his accusation.--[…] We do not share your Personal Information with third parties unless We have received your permission to do so, or given you notice thereof (such as by telling you about it in this Privacy Policy) […]-> He conveniently omitted the following section which we stated that we share personal information only in case of compliance with law. There’s no clause states that we share personal information to other businesses--[…] you acknowledge and agree that We may continue to use any non-personally-identifying information in accordance with this Privacy Policy (e.g., for the purpose of analysis, statistics and the like) also after the termination of your membership to this WebSite andor use of our services, for any reason whatsoever.-> "Non-personally-identifying” information is not the same with “personal” information. Are we the only company in this planet use analytics tools to better understand our users with cumulative behavioral data? It’s very misleading as-if we are using “personal information” after termination of membership when what we actually do is analyzing aggregate user behavior data like how many people visited, how many quizzes they took per visit etc.--[…] this Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of entities Vonvon does not own or control, or to individuals whom Vonvon does not employ or manage, including any third parties to whom Vonvon may disclose Personal Information[…]—> Again, he omitted ‘(as defined below)’ as in ‘including any third parties to whom Vonvon may disclose Personal Information(as defined below)’, which leads to the same section that states we only share personal information when it’s required by law.In fact, we did have the clause states that we might share personal information to trusted business partner few month ago - we put it in without much thought since most media sites have similar policies.But it back-fired in Japan few month ago with the similar rumor that we might sell personal information and we decided to delete the clause since we never sold and have no plan to sell personal information what-so-ever.We are a small team coping with surge of traffic from worldwide and we didn’t have luxury to play around legal documents to make elaborate loop holes. We were just busy developing great contents, system and team, global scale in just few months.Our privacypolicy may not be the world's best and I’m not proud of the state of sophistication.But, then again, we clearly have no intention to trick and make a hole in privacy policy - it’s more of an opposite.We did proactively take a step to limit the 3rd party we could share personal information only to law-enforcement, deliberately deleting the business partners from the “Sharing Information” section.And most importantly, we never sold and never will sell personal information on vonvon.meI’d appreciate it if you can correct your article.Thank you in advance.Best,Jonghwa
