How do Facebook question pages get your data and what data do they get?

Question

Lately, I've noticed a lot of FB notifications of friends asking stupid questions from other pages. The questions are usually along the lines of "What's the first movie you saw in the cinema?", "What's the next number in this sequence?", "What's a food you hated as a kid but love now?", etc., etc.

I suspect these are just scams to get people's data, but can find no articles on this. A few years ago, it was easy to find long lists of all the data third parties collected when you joined their groups, but nothing like that comes up anymore in a Google search. (No doubt, FB has tweaked the search results.)

Does anybody have any insights into the risk of answering those inane questions?

Answer 1

Here are a couple of references for you.

BBB Scam Alert:

... These quizzes appear to be meaningless, but the intent behind them is to collect information. For example, questions like: "What was the first car you owned?" “What is your mother's maiden name?” or “What is the name of the street you grew up on?” These are common security questions for insurance, banking and credit card accounts. Sharing this information can lead to accounts being hacked, and personal and financial information being stolen. ...

Ukrainian hackers used quizzes

... Working out of Kiev, Ukraine, Andrey Gorbachov and Gleb Sluchevsky allegedly lured Facebook users to connect their accounts to a range of online quiz apps with names like, “Do you have royal blood?, “You are yin. Who is your yang?” and “What kind of dog are you according to your zodiac sign?”

Once users connected their Facebook and other social media accounts they were asked to install what Facebook described as “malicious browser extensions” that essentially allowed the alleged hackers to pose as the affected users online. ...

... Last March, it emerged that a developer working on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, a controversial data firm that went on to work for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, had collected data on tens of millions of American Facebook users without their explicit knowledge. The developer had used an online quiz app that connected to Facebook to gather the data. ...