This Facebook App Could Be A Privacy Nightmare

If you enabled the app “Most Used Words on Facebook,” you may have given away more privacy than you intended. Unless you intended to allow South Korean startup Vonvon.me access to data including your name, profile picture, age, sex, birthday, entire friend list, all your timeline posts, every one of your photos, photos in which you’ve been tagged, hometown and current city, everything you’ve liked, your IP address, your education history, and the language and browser that you’re using. That’s according to Comparitech, which highlights the seemingly innocent game as a major "privacy nightmare." Comparitech the game has been shared 16 million times, but that was on Sunday and the numbers are almost assuredly higher by now. Vonvon is allowed, per the terms of the privacy policy, to sell your data to whomever it wants. Still, the data it collects are nothing not freely available on a publicly accessible Facebook. Sound scary? Vonvon CEO Jonghwa Kim begs to differ. In a response to Comparitech, he says, “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.” The rest of the exchange is documented here. It’s always stunning to see laid bare just how much privacy we give up online. Also, a great reminder to read the privacy policy before doing anything.