Home > News

Facebook to Scrutinize Personality Quiz Apps More

By Laura Tucker
News Facebook Personality Quiz Featured

If you enjoy personality quiz apps on Facebook, you may find those being much more limited in the future. You may not be able to sign on anymore and find out what you will look like in thirty years or what famous movie star you most look like now.

But the good news is it may lead to more safety for you. Facebook released the news that they will be scrutinizing personality quiz apps more. There won’t be as much access to them anymore, as they are focusing more on apps that “enrich” the user experience.

Facebook Limiting Personality Quizzes

Perhaps Facebook is realizing personality quizzes are the beginning of recent troubles. It all goes back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This was the company whose personality apps were in use on Facebook during the 2016 United States presidential election. It was discovered that these personality quizzes were used to gather customer data to send pointed political ads.

News Facebook Personality Quizzes Pie Chart

Facebook users were shocked the social media company used them in this way. After this it seemed like every week it was being discovered that Facebook was playing fast and loose with a lot of their customer data. It seemed to be neverending.

Now that the bandaid has been ripped off, exposing them, Facebook is now trying to control the pain and the bleeding.

They announced this change is part of their “ongoing commitments to privacy and security.” They will be “removing access to a number of APIs, updating our platform policies, and regularly evaluating an app’s access to user permissions.”

If you’re enjoying sharing all those quiz results with your friends on Facebook, you have just a few short months left to do so. Those apps that fit within a certain API will no longer have access to Facebook after July 30, and starting April 30, new apps will be allowed to have that access.

They’re also helping you out by clearing out some of those apps you haven’t seen or heard from in a while. When you take one of those quizzes, you give them access to log in to your Facebook, but then you never use the app again. So Facebook is removing those apps for you that you haven’t used or accessed in the past 90 days.

News Facebook Personality Quizzes Settings

When you sign in and go to “Log in with Facebook” in the settings, you’ll see three tabs: Active, Expired, and Removed. These will show the apps you still show as active, the apps they determined have “expired” and haven’t been used, and the ones you have removed yourself. Magically, I now only have five apps open after seemingly having hundreds previously.

Facebook also announced they will be updating their policies in the coming months and in utilizing developer feedback, will be “moving toward a more streamlined and straightforward experience for developers and eliminating the need for certain supplemental terms.”

What This Means for You

For right now, this can only be seen in positive terms. Right now, today, the apps have much less access to you. If they have been forgotten by you, they no longer have access. If future apps don’t do much for the user experience, they may not ever show up on your wall or your friends’ walls again.

But is this a little too little, a little too late? Has the ship already sailed for Facebook? Add your thoughts in the comments below and let us know how this Facebook change with regard to personality apps will affect you.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.