When you take an online quiz, who is REALLY listening?

This is a repost of something I just posted to another thread but I think it deserves it's own discussion.


Why are we so willing to associate very personal and confidential opinions toward government etc. with our own IP ADDRESSES and then nonchalantly hand them off by means of a simple mouse click to some random website offering a "really cool quiz"?

HELLO.........

Chalk me up as paranoid but I swear there is no easier way to get people to offer extremely personal information (which I imagine most of the participants would not even consider telling to a stranger on the street) than by offering a quiz which in turn will grant you the honor of being placed into "this box" or "that box".

WOW.

Many of these "quizzes" are nothing more than superbly crafted pieces of social engineering if you ask me. So. This cute little "quiz" just allowed you to place yourself into a box for your own entertainment value. Meanwhile, if this quiz were indeed nefarious in nature, anyone with an ability to extrapolate your IP address into your street address would be able to place you into predefined boxes of their own making (hmmm....I wonder who out there might have such an ability....)

People seem to be so careful about what they say to strangers, but place an interesting quiz in front of them and they will tell you damn near anything you want to know.

So you tell me, am I just paranoid or are people lining up by the thousands to give very personal information (and quite possibly IDENTIFIABLE information) to complete strangers.

I think these are questions we should all ask ourselves next time we are presented with a random quiz. Who is really listening?

I welcome your opinions....

EDIT for clarification



[edit on 25-4-2008 by SystemiK]

I just had another occasion which got me thinking on this subject again and I remembered having written this thread. Does no one else think these online quizzes can be an insidious method of mining the public for all kinds of personal information? I'm not suggesting that all of them are, just that the potential is very real. Hell, if I wanted to mine the general public for personal data, this method would be at the top of my list.

If you've ever taken some of these personality quizzes, political views quizzes etc., think a moment about all of the very personal information you may have offered about yourself. Would you offer any of that information to a complete stranger on the street? If not, why would you feel comfortable offering it to a complete stranger on the web? It may be that you feel that you are annonymous but is there really even any such thing on the web these days?

Any thoughts?