Scroll down your Facebook feed, and there’s a good chance you’ll stumble across at least one of the many wildly popular BuzzFeed quizzes… perhaps one that could tell you which superhero you should be or what city you should live in. Quizzes like this are one of the many diversions BuzzFeed has to offer, but what exactly is BuzzFeed getting out of your participation for a quiz like this?
In his personal blog , web online marketing expert Dan Barker posted an entry labeled “BuzzFeed is Watching You,” wherein he breaks apart the code of BuzzFeed’s site, essentially showing how the they can pull data from questions answered (and not answered) by the reader.
This flies in the face of an interview NPR’s Scott Simon had last March with Ad Age reporter Kate Kaye regarding BuzzFeed and this very subject. “I actually confirmed this with BuzzFeed,” states Kaye. “What they are doing is just tracking what the final results of the quizzes are–so they’re not even tracking whether or not you gave a particular response to a particular question in the quiz.” So there is a bit of a discrepancy between which bits of information are actually being tracked–BuzzFeed claiming to only have the results while Barker finds they’re perfectly capable of tracking individual answers. Keep in mind Kaye’s response came from a BuzzFeed rep while Barker’s information came from tapping into the site itself. Was this an active untruth on BuzzFeed’s part?
Minor discrepancies aside, the fact remains that information is indeed being taken. While BuzzFeed may not be tracking individual answers (according to them), they are undoubtedly keeping your results. Kaye even goes on to hypothesize how BuzzFeed may use their data in the future:
As far as I can tell they’re sort of conditioning people to respond to certain types of these questions like so when [Buzzfeed] do[es] start compiling the data that way, [readers will be] like “oh yeah this is the way the quizzes are,” and then down the road [BuzzFeed could add in a question like,] “what kind of vacation do you like to take?”
When all said and done, the consensus still seems to be that BuzzFeed is indeed storing your information for future use. How important is it that BuzzFeed is taking information like this from you? Do you feel your privacy is being invaded by BuzzFeed, or is this just an inevitable consequence of Internet use?
