Internet Safe - Facebook Apps

"What kind of flower are you?
"What time period of history do you belong in?"
"What city should you live in?"
"Can we guess your age in twenty questions?"

I've seen hundreds of these quizzes on Facebook. Things have gotten busier over the past few years but especially when Bear was little I would often kill time with them.  They're just ridiculous fun, right? I'd always kind of wondered what about that question about access to your personal information that comes up before the quiz starts. Then I happened to notice that a lot of those quizzes showed up as apps on my Facebook Sidebar - years later. It got me thinking a little bit.

So maybe I'm overcautious or even to a degree possibly paranoid but the stories are out there of hackers and the like who can access our online personal information and use it in ways that I don't even want to think about. Well, the other week I was reading an article about a woman who by some chance discovered pictures that she had posted of her daughter had been hacked and used in very inappropriate ways. The article didn't say how the pictures were obtained but it made me think about my privacy settings on Facebook and I looked again at all those apps for question sites and games that were just sitting on my sidebar.

Did you know that most of those apps granted all sorts of access to not only my account by anyone on my friends list as well? Many of them included:

• My public profile
• Relationships
• Relationship interests
• Birthday
• Chat status
• Notes
• Work history
• Status updates
• Education history
• Events
• Groups
• Groups you manage
• Hometown
• Interests
• Current city
• Photos – including photos I am tagged in
• Religious and political views
• Videos
• Website
• Personal description
• Likes
• My friends relationship status
• My friends relationship interests
• My friends birthdays
• My friends chat statuses
• Notes my friends share with me
• My friends status updates that are shared with me
• Friends work histories
• Friends education histories
• Events shared with me by friends
• Friends groups
• Friends hometowns
• Friends interests
• Friends locations
• Friends photos that are shared with me
• Friend’s religious and political views
• Friends’ videos that are shared with me
• Friends descriptions
• Friends likes

Anyone else think that's a whole lot of personal information? I realize that most of those questionnaires and games were totally innocent but personally I decided I wasn't ok with giving some unknown entity access to all of that so I removed access and deleted almost all of those apps.  There is also a place under apps where you can control and limit the access to your account that your friends apps have even if your friends don't change their settings. 

Like I said, I'm probably paranoid a bit but I just figure that even though I'm pretty cautious with what I post online, it can't hurt anything to be a little more aware and take some safety precautions.