A normal browsing session on Buzzfeed may include GIF-filled lists, quick news blurbs, and a zillion pop-culture quizzes, but what can the site do once it tells you which 30 Rock character you are? According to a British e-commerce specialist, the answer is quite a bit, as Buzzfeed users are coughing up a lot more personal information than they may realize.
In another reminder that everything you do on the Internet leaves a clicktrail, a post at Dan Barker's personal blog opened by picking through the default Buzzfeed browsing data sent to Google Analytics. That data included whether users have connected Facebook to Buzzfeed, how often they've shared Buzzfeed stories to social media, their gender and age (if those have been publicly disclosed), their location, and more.
All of that data was assigned to a "username" value, which Barker noted was the same across multiple browsers on the same PC. Barker analyzed the site's many quizzes, where he found that each quiz answer he chose (or didn't choose) was tracked alongside all of that other potentially personally identifiable information.
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