Social media manipulation
Facebook and Google are circumventing the notion of giving consumers control of their personal data, according to a report by the Norwegian Consumers Council. After analysing their privacy pop-ups, the Council said the companies steer people into sharing data by cunning design choices, confusing layouts and an illusion of choice. As the report points out, this conflicts with the intention of new data protection legislation which became enforceable a month ago. Meanwhile, a security researcher has described how information of more than 120 million Facebook users was exposed publicly through use of a popular quiz app. Nametests.com allows users to discover the answers to burning questions such as, "Which Disney princess are you?" It turns out it also allowed any website subsequently visited to view a range of personal information about the user.