We’ve all played them, those innocent little games that appear on social media and are shared to our friends so that we may compare results.  They will ask you to answer a series of questions in order to determine what sort of tree you would be or which super hero you would identify with.

While you are being matched with a quaking aspen or being compared to Thor or Wonder Lass you are also contributing to someone’s demographic data base for the purpose of becoming a commodity.

The information you provide when answering the questions, linked to your social media platform, is valuable input for marketing departments all around the globe.

A particularly transparent version of this information gathering technique showed up on my Face Book page.  This one had a sophistication level so low that it might well have been crafted by one of those wives-cousins-brothers-nephews of some Nigerian government official who had died leaving umpteen and a half million in a secret bank account which could now be shared by you in exchange for all your banking data.

The following illustration is not linked to anything and cannot be used to “play” the game.

At the time this showed up on my FB page there was one respondent.  She scored ‘freaky-freaky-outstanding-freaky’, or a phone number ending in 3303.  In as much as the game was keyed to her social media platform and therefore her profile, the authors knew her name, location, telephone area code and prefix.  There are areas which have more than one prefix but robo-dialers don’t seem to mind.

She is now in yet another data base and someone is collecting a fee for having added her name.

Speaking only for myself, I get a sufficient number of telephone solicitations without making their job any easier.