Bad Facebook, No Biscuit!

I am this close to deleting my Facebook account.  At first the apps just drove me mildly insane, but then I figured out how to block the gabillionty updates that appeared in my news feed and I thought all was good.

Except that there are always new apps.  It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole with the app blocking, and that drives me slightly insane too.  But I could live with it.

Until this morning.  I’ve been seeing all of these “friendly quiz” updates all over my feed, where people answer a question about their friends.  There are about 4 different apps that I’ve seen so far that do this same thing.  It works under the premise of how well do you know your friends and how well do your friends know you?

When you click on the app you get to see the questions people answered about you, but you don’t get to see who answered until you answer a shitpot of questions about your friends, which is how they perpetuate this bullshit.  Human nature is to want to know what people have to say about you and they are banking on the fact that you can’t resist knowing what’s hidden in the box and you will play along to find out.

It all seemed pretty harmless until I looked at the questions.  Most of them are totally innocuous, like Is Lisa geeky? and Do you think Lisa knows how to drive a stick shift?

And then I got to this one: Do you think Lisa makes more than $50K a year?

Hey there, ho there, back up the information superhighway!  This is information I’m not going to give out willy-nilly on Facebook.  I presume this app assumes that my friends know me well enough to answer this question correctly, so here’s my question.

What is the purpose of the information these apps are gathering?  It seems like nothing more than a cleverly disguised data miner to me.

Am I crazy in thinking that this is not ok?  Whether it’s just to target their sidebar ads more effectively, or some other more sinister reason, I am just not down with this kind of monkeyshine.  I can block this app from my feed and from gathering my information from my feed, but if I block the app does that mean it has to stop asking questions about me?  Or does that just mean that I won’t see the questions it asks about me anymore while it goes along its merry way sticking its nose all up in my hoobastank?  Because I’ve noticed that this app asks questions about everyone, even people I know are on top of their Facebook privacy game.

It’s all fun and Facebook games until someone loses an eye.  In my case, 99% of the people on my Facebook account don’t know me well enough to answer these questions correctly but that’s kind of beside the point.

What do you think?  Am I totally over-reacting?  Has paranoia finally destroyed me?  Is it possible to completely block these apps from even asking about you?  Does it even matter?  I have an itchy trigger finger poised over the “delete account” button, and inquiring minds want to know.