Did you know that some online health/fitness/aging quizzes may be invading your privacy? Further that for some of the questions may be geared to getting information for sponsors, rather than being relevant to the quiz.
How much weight (pun intended) do you put in these tests? Have you ever thought about why some sites may want certain personal details? There a quite shocking article about the RealAge site in the NYT last week.
Apparently the RealAge site collects information about you as you do the quiz, and sells the information to drug companies. The drug companies can use that information to target you.
A hypothetical example. Say there is a question that asks you whether you have diabetes. If you answer yes, your email address is added to a database that is sold to a drug company that makes diabetes testing kits. You then start to get emails about diabetes and their product.
I looked at their privacy policy. Though they say they will not give data to third parties, if you keep with the default selection membership and so will be receiving newsletters plus informational emails, then you are allowing them the drug companies via RealAge to send you advertisements. This is an advantage to the drug companies, since if the email looks like it is a RealAge informational email rather than a drug company advertisement, you are more likely to open it.
This then poses the question, are the tests, in part, geared to the health or other conditions that are treated by products that sponsoring companies sell? There a certainly quite a number of questions of dubious merit in the quiz. There is no scientific basis at-all for what some of the questions are used to conclude.
Plus, if you honestly answer all the questions you are giving quite a bit of inform about yourself. This is used to more target the marketing to different segments of the population. A middle-aged overweight male with high blood pressure who lives in the Illinois, may get a different advertisement than a female retiree with high blood pressure that lives in Florida.
This is one way the site makes a lot of money. According to the NYT, RealAge was estimated to be worth $60 to $70 million when it was sold in 2007!
Test-taker beware.
[tags]health quiz, aging quiz, test, privacy, sponsor, drug company, advertisement[/tags]
