Insanely Popular App QuizUp Could Be Telling Strangers All About You, Competitor Says
But QuizUp may be doing some sneaky things with private information stored on your phone, sending that information to complete strangers, according to Kyle Richter, a developer of a competing trivia app called Trivium.
QuizUp lets players compete against their friends or strangers in over 300 different categories of trivia, ranging from the super specific (Desperate Housewives or 16th and 17th Century History) to the more broad (Logos or Physics).
When you sign up, the app asks for access to your email contacts or your Facebook friends and that's part of the problem.
In a blog post on Monday, Richter says:
"In the case of QuizUp they actually send you other users' personal information via plain-text(un-hashed); right to your iPhone or iPod touch. This information includes but isn't limited to: full names, Facebook IDs, email addresses, pictures, genders, birthdays, and even location data for where the user currently is. I have been able to access the personal information of hundreds of people who I have never met, and had no interaction with other than we both used QuizUp. These people likewise had access to my personal information. It is important to keep in mind these were not people who added me as friends inside of the app, these were complete strangers in every sense."
Richter says you don't have to be a hacker or tech genius to find this information. On his blog he shows an example of the data that QuizUp sent to his phone, full of names, email addresses, even the state each person lives in. He replaced some data with asterisks (**) to protect people, he said.
He notes that Path made a similar privacy mistake and it led to an $800,000 fine by the federal government.
QuizUp has not yet publicly responded to these claims. A QuizUp spokesperson said a full statement is coming soon and told Business Insider, "we ... will assure you that all user's information is secure on QuizUp."