Facebook Quizzes: Harmless Fun or Tools of Commercialism?

Recently, my Facebook news feed has been inundated with these mysterious quizzes where they would ask "What type of politician are you?", "At what age will you have children?", "How good are you in Kelantanese?" etc. Well, I've tried one of them (I got Lim Kit Siang; someone who wants liberte, equalite, fraternite, no?) and I saw that now, you can actually make your own quiz! Well, how nifty is that?

It's not. And here's why.

Right from when this application was packaged, distributed and pushed to everyone's news feed, it has now become a cyberspace drug of epic proportions, being the filler of a Facebook junkie's boredom. Once you tried one and got the high from the results which was in your favor, you decide to shoot up another one. And another one. And another. Not contented, you decide to allow the application to post your results on everyone's news feed, letting them know of the availability of this drug. Still not contented, you move on to another variation of the drug. And repeat.

Alright. Enough with the metaphore. Here's the lowdown.

Once you click on a quiz, this will show up e.g.

Allowing Kuiz Tatabahasa Kedah! to access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work.

You have now made a commitment to let the application use all your personal information on your Facebook account AND your network of friends so it can "work." Hmm, wonder what that means? So, ignoring this stupid request you press Allow.

Now, it's quiz time! But wait, before you begin clicking on the answers look around the page. If you notice on the top, bottom and right side of the quiz there are other "clickable" links asking, begging & persuading you to join their test, quiz or game. But being the addicted, ahem, I mean committed quiz taker you are, you would continue to finish the quiz and can't wait to get the exciting results that you wanna share with your pals!

In reality, you have just become a tool of Facebook for them to maximize their profits; they are aware that by promoting these quizzes & also letting their users (yup, that's you and me) create their own quizzes, they can increase the number of their web pages to post advertisements. Since Facebook is a free social networking site, advertisements and commercials are the primary, if not only, source of revenue for them. Thus, the more popular and highly accessed a quiz is, the more advertisers would want to pay for the page & the richer Facebook gets!

So, I offer you two options:

1. Stop being Facebook's cash cow! Ignore those quizzes, hide them from your news feed & encourage your friends not to take it. And since they're applications you can delete it from your profile by simply go to "Settings" --> "Application Settings" and click those "X"s on the right. Prevent Facebook from using your profile as an ATM machine!
   
2. Ignore & deride everything I said and continue to gleefully do the "What type of flower are you?" and "Are you stupid?" knowing that Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, is laughing all the way to the bank.