"Which Disney character are you? What season are you? How happy a person are you? What sex position are you?"

Sound familiar? Judging from the activity in my Facebook news scroller, most of my friends take these silly Facebook quizzes without a second thought. Their results are interesting and sometimes surprising and entertaining, even if inane... But that's not why I refuse to do quizzes. Rather, it is:

"Allowing Which mathematical function are you? access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work."

What is this? By clicking "Allow", I'm giving it access to all my personal information. All of it! And people are doing this why? For the mild entertainment the quiz provides? Wow.

The New York Times tells that these quizzes are the harvest point in a chain of profit ending in that junk mail you get, offering you cheap antidepressants, Viagra, and solutions for getting thinner. Information is the second currency of this new millennium, and these quizzes are virtual farms: it doesn't matter whether the quiz was about a mathematical function or my relationship with your mom, the quiz application (or any other application you confirm, rather) has full and unrestricted access to all content related to you, your account, and the visible information on your friends' accounts!

Okay, so maybe your spam filter is good enough to take care of this. But think about it: do you want all your and your friends' Facebook information floating out unrestricted in unknown hands on the Internet? Please, think twice before clicking "Allow."

PS This was inspired by an article on Slashdot.

PPS In the meantime before I restored this post, jwalsh wrote an entry in his blog about this.