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Viral Facebook Most Used Words app accused of harvesting user data

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By John Glenday, Reporter

November 26, 2015 | 2 min read

A viral Facebook app has been thrown under the spotlight amidst accusations that it is being used as a Trojan Horse to extract vast amounts of data from individual users and their friends, which can then be sold onto third parties.

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Most Used Words on Facebook is one of the most popular apps on the social networking site, using the premise of a simple word cloud to lure members in but it only becomes available after a request to access your information and personal Facebook page is granted.

This gives it access to individual likes, IP addresses and even the browser being used, amongst other things.

For those who agree the app generates a word cloud generated by the frequency of common words used in a person’s profile, placing them together in a single image with individual words made larger or smaller based on the frequency of repetition.

This is then posted as a status update, allowing the app to propagate amongst friends and family with around 16m people thought to have agreed to sign up already.

The issue was first brought to light by technology site Comparitech which says that that app producer Vonvon has now agreed to limit its access to ‘the minimum requirement to produce each separate content’.

It also added that it does not store personal data and thus has nothing to sell.

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