Why You Shouldn’t Play That ‘Fun Quarantine Game’ On Facebook

If you’ve been on Facebook lately you’ve probably seen an influx of “fun” games suggesting you tell everyone the names of all the streets you’ve lived on or all the cars you’ve had or the song that was popular the year you were born. Or how about the one suggesting you post your senior-year high school photo?

On the surface, all those suggestions seem like fun things you might share with friends. In reality, all those posts can be used by hackers to get access to your private accounts.

Of course, your friend that posted it is probably not a hacker. They probably saw another friend post it, they were bored, and decided to participate as well.

If you pay attention, however, you’ll notice that the answers to all those fun games are also the same things you might enter when you’re trying to verify your identity on a website in order to reset your password. When you post those answers on the internet, you’re making them easy for someone that isn’t your friend to find through a simple internet search and use against you.

The “song that was popular when you were born” can give a hacker your birthday. That senior picture that you captioned “North High School Eagles 1979!” tells someone what year you graduated and what your school’s mascot was. Things like the streets you grew up on and the make and model of your first car are pretty self-explanatory.

Think about what you’re posting, and if the answer is something you might need as part of a security question, don’t post it.

If you absolutely can’t stop yourself from taking part (again, you shouldn’t), make sure you’re only sharing those answers with your friends rather than friends of friends or the world as a whole. You can do that by clicking the icon beside the time stamp on the post and changing the privacy of the post to “Friends.”

The best course of action, of course, is to simply opt out of these posts and maybe drop a link to this one in the comments of any of them you see. While innocent enough now, that “fun quarantine game” is going to be anything but fun down the line when you’re trying to get your accounts back.