8/8/2023 0 Comments My most used words app dangerIt doesn’t mean the app can post from your account whenever it liked. Once you complete your ‘word cloud’ you are given the option to share it on your timeline, but this would be a one-time only post. ![]() The app never asked us to give it permission to post from our account by itself, so no. Will the ‘What are your most used words on Facebook’ app post spammy links from my account? The developer of the app is a website called VonVon, who have a number of other apps on their site (including some dodgy-sounding “Facebook stalker” apps and lots of other trashy sounding apps.) They have a privacy policy that states they don’t share your information with third parties without your consent, and if they do, they will remove any personally identifiable data, so ultimately it comes down to whether you’d trust them to honour that agreement. You can do this by clicking the “Edit the info you provide” link on the permissions pop-up as with the screenshot above.īut does this mean the app is harvesting our data? In short, we don’t know. If you do choose to install an app, we always recommend limiting the information it has access to. Thus we know that the app is asking for far more permissions than it actually needs, which is certainly a red flag. In fact, we know this information is not required, since we edited the permissions to only allow this app access to our profile picture and our timeline posts, and the resulting ‘word cloud’ was the same. ![]() We fail to see how this information is required to analyse our timeline posts in search for our most popular words. This is perhaps the more interesting question, since when the permissions box came up (screenshot below) it did ask for access to a lot of information about us, including our birthday, friends list, hometown, likes and photos. Facebook apps can lead to phishing scams, by asking for sensitive information about you like passwords, but we installed the app and it did no such thing.ĭoes the ‘What are your most used words on Facebook’ app harvest a user’s a personal information? Is the ‘What are your most used words on Facebook’ app a phishing scam?įrom what we can tell, the answer is also no. Yes, some Apps can try and lead you to webpages that will try to install malware on your computer, but we haven’t seen this with the “What are your most used words” Facebook app. Malware, on the other hand, installs on your computer. Facebook apps are not malware (this includes viruses.) They install on your Facebook account. Is the ‘What are your most used words on Facebook’ app a virus or malware? Let’s take those questions, one at a time. ![]() ![]() So the question is, is it really any of those things? Many have claimed it’s a phishing scam, a virus, malware or even a nefarious method of harvesting your data. It is an app that analyses your past posts and provides a “word cloud” that depicts what words you used the most in the last year or so. Whenever a Facebook app goes viral, we inevitably get a surge of questions asking us if it’s a virus, malware or a phishing scam.Īnd that has been the case with the “What are Your Most Used Words on Facebook” app that currently seems to be the trending app on Facebook at the moment. This article has been updated with the response from the app developer at the end of the article. We investigate the app and clear up some confusion along the way. A viral app on Facebook has got some people confused and worried, highlighting there is still lots to learn about how Facebook apps work and what they can and cannot do.
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