Researcher: Facebook quiz maker NameTests exposed personal info of ~120M users for years, in a data leak that was fixed after the Cambridge Analytica scandal
Ever took a personality test on Facebook? For years, anyone could have accessed your private information, friends, posts and photos.
Context & Ripple Effects
The NameTests disclosure is the third quiz-app failure to surface in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Earlier reporting showed how personality quizzes were used to build psychological profiles of voters, and a May investigation found myPersonality data sat on an insecure research site for four years, exposing 3M+ users.
First-order effects
- Roughly 120 million people who took NameTests quizzes had their information, friends, posts and photos reachable by anyone until the fix landed — exposure that ended only because the Cambridge Analytica reckoning over up to 87M harvested profiles put every quiz developer under scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces mounting pressure to audit its entire third-party app ecosystem, not just the apps tied to the scandal — the myPersonality finding showed insecure handling extended beyond any single developer.
Third-order effects
- If quiz apps keep failing audits at this scale, the structural outcome is the end of broad friend-and-profile data access for third-party developers, with platforms retaining that data behind their own walls.
The trend: Third-party Facebook apps are being forced from open access to user graphs toward locked-down, platform-controlled permissions as each new leak lands.