Social networking sites: User's privacy at stake!
By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Tuesday, 19 October 2010, 13:43 IST   |    3 Comments
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Social networking sites: User's privacy at stake!
Bangalore: "How trustworthy and secure is my favourite social networking site?" This must be the most obvious question today troubling the minds of people who have their personal accounts in any of the social networking sites. Whether we talk of Facebook, Twitter or Google's Orkut, all of the sites have fallen prey to issues related to security breach. While collaborative and distributed approaches promoted by social networking sites can be very beneficial, there can be serious concerns regarding information security and privacy of the user's account. The social networking sites are full of personal information of the users and easy accessibility of many of those has attracted leering people who seek to exploit this information. The most important point to be noted here is that technologies helpful for easy participation of users can also make the sites vulnerable to malware attacks or hackers. Facebook has faced networking glitches many times. In 2009, two off its applications created security problems for the users. By downloading the app, users were giving hackers access to their profile and personal information, and also unknowingly forwarding fake messages to their friends. But is it the virus attacks only that have made the social networking unsafe? Are the sites clean enough on their part? Not necessarily. Blames have been made on many of the social networking sites of selling the user's personal data to advertising and Internet tracking companies. Facebook, for instance, has been blamed of selling phenomenal amount of personal information that Facebook members put in their profiles to marketers, advertisers, and data collectors. Social networking sites have financial incentives to generate revenues from the information users upload. They create marketing profiles of their users and serve them with targeted ads. According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, at least 10 applications in Facebook have been sending personal information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. Thanks to social networking sites, people like to share their personal information with others and in recent years, participation in social networking sites has dramatically increased. The more people participate in social networking, the more information they will post and the more information people post, the more information becomes available for a potential compromise by those with malicious intentions. Hence, security and privacy related to social networking sites are fundamentally behavioral issues, not technology issues. With over 350 million members combined, social networking sites are growing with enormous pace. Considering the rising popularity of social networks, its little surprise that there have been several high-profile breaches of security on huge sites like Facebook. The problems plaguing social network security and privacy issues can only be resolved if users take a more careful approach to what they share and how much.

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