Lawsuit says, let’s face it: Quizzes on social media not benign

Those just-for-fun quizzes on Facebook have been trying to learn more about you than what your eye color says about you or what kind of a person people think you are. 

A lawsuit filed this month by Facebook against two Ukrainian men alleges such quizzes have been stealing the personal data of some 63,000 users, causing $75,000 worth of damage to the social media company, according to Fortune magazine.

The quizzes, allegedly created by defendants and entrepreneurs Andrey Gorbachov and Gleb Sluchevsky, tricked users into installing malicious browser extensions that mined a person’s profile data and friends list, according to a federal lawsuit, accessed by the magazine.

By agreeing to a quiz, the defendants allegedly installed malicious browser extensions, which were able to collect profile data, allowing the quiz-makers to “inject unauthorized advertisements when the app users visited Facebook or other social networking site as part of their online browsing,” the complaint reveals.