Quiz application is an application template created by applatform.com, I think they are one of the FBFund recipients! Its simply provides a wizard for anybody to create what ever quiz applications he/she wants. Yes! a NEW application for each quiz!
So what is the big deal? First, every body can create stupid quizzes. This means there are thousands of quizzes out there in different languages based on different cultures. Second, every time someone takes one of the quizzes, a big ugly feed gets posted on your news feed. (Well the look really depends on the quiz designers' taste which experience shows most if the times it sucks!). Since each quiz is a different application with a unique ID, with the current design of facebook there is no way to shut up the whole thing. For example, if you block "Which part of body are you?" quiz, this does not stop "Find out How stupid you are?".
The end result is, when around 11 PM you finally get a chance to log in to your face book to read what you actually concern like your friends status, events, wall-to-walls, or a nice video that your friend has posted, you just see a page full of quizzes some of them in the languages that you don't even understand!
At this time, as far as I know, many people are concern about this app, specially application developers because their application get buried between spams. They are pushing to ban this application under section 5.3 of Facebook Platform Policy. Also, facebook team promised to come up with a better filtering facility. Well, if Facebook CEO stops dreaming to have a copy of twitter in the heart of facebook. Meanwhile, I think it is just a general responsibility that each of us must take. A virtual social ethic that should not be different than what we have in our day to day life. I mean do you really walk in the street and shout to the people, or say things in different languages that they don't understand.
You can simply stop this spam. How? Well. when you take a quiz, at the end when it asks you to send it to all, simply say NO.
your own safety:
Virtual ethic is not just for others' convenience , but for our own safety. Remember hackers and identity thieves are not like what you see in the movies. A nerd sitting in a dark room with many flat screens. Usually they are social engineers who spend time to find information about people. Valuable information that we usually leave carelessly around. They use this information to impersonate themselves to access our governmental or financial accounts .
Also, when you are adding a new application think three times! :). Most of these applications are not developed by facebook and face book does not control them or accepts responsibility for any damages caused by aplications. Have you notice when you want to add a new app, it ask you to give it permission to have a full access to your data?! This applications can be used to steal your information, hijack your session, and execute different cross script attacks. What I never thought that can be possible is to use your profile as a bot for DOS attacks!
There is one golden rule, and it is not just for the facebook, but for the entire virtual world. the rule is when you want to submit any thing (e.g. comment, a picture or a note), think twice. Imagine if you were actually sitting around a huge table with all of your lets say 100 friends, including your best friends and your current colleges. Would you still going to do the same thing that you are going to do on the net?
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