Saturday, March 24, 2018

How a cow-clicking parody game harvested Facebook user data

Back in 2010, the video-game designer and scholar Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a withering satire of Farmville and other clicker games that were, at the time, wildly popular on Facebook. As he developed Cow Clicker, Bogost quickly discovered something: Facebook gave app developers a lot of data about users. He was able to get each user"s unique Facebook ID (Zuckerberg"s is"4", as it turns out); and without even him asking for it, Facebook sent him "affiliation" info about users" schools, workplaces, and other organizations they belonged to.

No comments:

Post a Comment