External Link: Facebook: Give Me Real Control Over My Information

If you use Facebook, you or your friends have probably taken a quiz about '80s trivia or Disney princesses. These quizzes might be fun, but it’s shocking just how much of your information they can access. Join us and demand that Facebook protect your privacy by restricting access to your personal information!

Even if your Facebook profile is “private,” when you take a quiz, an unknown quiz developer could be getting access to almost everything in your profile: your religious views, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups. In fact, Facebook quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends’ profiles. This means that if your friend takes a quiz, they could be giving away your personal information too. (But don’t just take our word for it: take our quiz and see for yourself!)

And Facebook’s current restrictions on the collection and use of personal information by applications are simply inadequate. Although Facebook’s Terms of Service require that applications limit the collection and use of information, enforcing terms like these is really difficult. That means that random developers who choose to ignore the Terms of Service could potentially sweep up vast amount of personal information about you and your friends – and once they’ve collected it, they could sell it, share it, or even turn it over to the government. This is a major privacy hole, and Facebook needs to take stronger steps to address this problem.

In recent months, Facebook has committed to taking several steps to improve user privacy. As part of these changes, Facebook needs to ensure that users are truly in control of their own information. That means changing the default privacy settings so that each user, and not that user’s friends, can decide whether to share her information with a third-party application.

That's where you come in. Please join us in asking Facebook to change its default privacy settings to ensure that your information is only shared with the friends and applications you choose!