Can a Facebook quiz or game hack my account?

Facebook quizzes and 'personality games' requesting broad permissions to your account data are a well-documented privacy risk. When you 'Sign in with Facebook' or grant an app permission, you may hand over your name, email, friend list, photos, and more to a third party whose privacy practices are unknown. Some apps sell this data; others use it for targeted phishing or to build social engineering profiles. A separate attack uses quiz-style posts ('What is your mother's maiden name? What was your first pet?') to harvest common security question answers without ever requesting account access. Be extremely selective with any app or quiz that requests Facebook permissions, and regularly audit your connected apps in Facebook settings.

The data these apps collect outlives the moment of fun: profile details, friend lists, and interaction history feed profiles used for targeted phishing years later, and permissions granted once persist until revoked. The security-question harvest is subtler still — pet names, first schools, and mothers' maiden names gathered through viral posts map directly onto account-recovery questions at banks and email providers.

Two habits neutralise most of the risk: a periodic sweep of connected apps in your settings, removing anything unfamiliar or unused, and treating personal trivia as security information rather than conversation material. Where a service still relies on security questions, fictional answers stored in a password manager sever the link between your public history and your accounts.