“What was the old age?”
“Who is your favorite friend?”
“How many lovers you have?”
“Which celebrity looks alike you?”
“Who will kill you?”
Do you feel you have heard these questions several times in recent past? Yes you are right. This are the questions and answers generate by a Fun App Named “Testony” (https://en.testony.com/ ). There are few more similar fun Apps like Nametest (https://en.nametests.com/), http://en.quizzstar.com/, https://sharmin.me/ , http://meawquiz.com/ and so on. Out of these Testony seems to be more popular as facebook got flooded with the output results.
How do these Apps work? They want to get some access permissions mainly Facebook (or similar social applications) and in return they get useful datas like email, message, contacts, profile, about, date of birth etc. In some cases, you have to log in to Facebook and have to apply the application to an approved application, so your information can be seen by all those applications, so it is not impossible to know the password with backend scripts.
Did you ever think how collection or leakage of data has become a cakewalk with this revolutionary marketing intelligence. This is a Honey Trap where using social media, using funny Apps, unknowingly all information and information about the persons are getting collected with user’s consent. These kind of Apps are nothing but an algorithmic Data Collection Software with various sample sizes, segments, across the globe.
Mostly everyone have been trapped by this for only getting fun. Unintentionally, all your online information, content, email lists, phonebooks, surfing patterns, browsing history are being collected by an unknown third party and being retained in their repository. Do they have any accountability? What do we know about the millions of information that they are getting used to? There is no guarantee of spamming or hacking using this information?
It is clearly defined in “Testony” site that they can use your information in business. You might get newsletters, mails, SMS as a part of Targeted advertisement for several products. This is applicable for the countries of America and Europe though nothing explicitly defined for India and other countries.
We are laughing with the friends about it, but how we are putting ourselves to the danger zone by revealing all personal data to the hacker.
Hacking/Phishing from these informations may be a child’s play for a hacker.
Immediate Resolution
To keep yourself on a safe side follow these steps to secure yourself :
1.Hide all the testony app posts from your timeline.
2. If you already have used this app then you must have to change your password immediately. If your Facebook email and passwords are interrelated with any email or etc then you must change that as well.
3. Now go to applications settings tab on your Facebook account and remove that app from your list.
4.But as you will be able to see a note there: Testony.com may still have the data you shared with them. For details about removing this data, please contact testony.com or visit the testony.com privacy policy.
Way Forward
We all see daydream. Everyone would love to be compared with a Super Hero, A Politician, A sportsman, A historic character. And then you feel proud or overwhelmed while getting likes/comments in social media with emotions.
We are being flooded to enough Internet data, but we need to learn to use it, rather to avoid misuse of it.
Time has come to be careful and do not share your valuable and secret information to any third party in this manner.