Security And Privacy Issues Associated With Social Media

Summary of research paper on social media

Discuss about the Security and Privacy Issues Associated with Social Media.

The report will discuss in detail about the privacy as well as security challenges on social networking website. The website usually suffers from challenges that are usually the popular one. However, security and privacy issues are two different and distinct issues.  It is important to understand that a security related issue also occurs when a hacker can gain any kind of unauthorised reach to the website which is protected as per the coding. The privacy issues are based any kind of unwarranted accessibility in the personal data and it doesn’t have to involve any kind of privacy breaches (Elmaghraby & Losavio, 2014). Anyone can get control of confidential information by getting the access of password. Both types of breaches are usually intertwined on social media platform specifically since anyone can breach a website security network open the door for the easy access in the confidential data associated with any user. However, the potential kind of disadvantages to a single user that boils down on how much a user can get engaged in social media along with amount of data that they are wanting to share. Therefore, the social networking sites like Facebook users may have many friends and hundreds of groups membership is more likely to get very harmed because of the breach than someone who normally uses the website.

In today’s world, the existence of web 2.0 and social networking sites has increased the number of opportunities of the society for the sake of communication and networking while it also enables the users of the internet to further contribute in content online. The data flows also develop, along with number of techniques like Open Source Intelligence Techniques that must be processes as well as crawled for number of reasons from personal level advertising to behaviour profiling. The research paper discussed about different examples from social media and digital world where the impact of privacy issues was major (Gritzalis et al, 2014). The discussion is based on understanding the insider threat forecast methods by testing the personality trait of user in narcissism that is also deemed to be closely associated with the overall manifestation of so many kinds of malevolent insiders as it was based on generating buzz through Twitter. It is also important to raise the awareness of users over profiling on political basis as well as data processing for many discriminative goals through methods that can be applied to YouTube. Since both the methods put the user privacy at stake, there are number of legal ways for every case because it will effectively save from any kind of privacy violation based threats and present so many exceptional examples like selecting the security officers for critically infrastructure where methods can detect the internal threat can be utilised (Gritzalis et al, 2014).

History of Information: The case of Privacy and Security in Social Media

There are number of social media techniques that are present for many health care professionals consisting of social networking platforms, blogs, media sharing websites and virtual based reality along with gaming culture. These kinds of tools can also be used to enhance the networking or education of professional with organizational based promotion, care of the patients, their education and many public health programs. At the same time, they also present many kinds of potential risks for patients associated with the distribution of inferior quality data, damage in the image of the professional, different kind of breaches in patient privacy along with violation personal as well as professional level of boundaries and licensing the legal challenges (Ventola, 2014). There are number of health care organization and professional institution that have provided clear guidelines to save such risks. Social media has also provided HCPs with techniques and tools that share data and debate about the health care based policies and practices based challenges to promote health attitude, engage more with public and educate and communicate with the patients, students, caregivers and colleagues. Moreover, the HCP can utilise social media to properly improve the health results and develop a professional level network and rise the personal level awareness of news as well as discoveries that motivate the patients and provide with health based data to the community. There are number of heath information which is available for the community. The physicians usually join the online societies where they can read the articles, also listen to expert advice, research based medical growth, consulting the colleagues related to issues of patients and provide information about the health of the community (Ventola, 2014). The information can be shared with cases and ideas along with discussion on practice management issues which form referrals and disseminate the research where market with practice can easily engage in advocacy of health. There is a developing minority of number of physicians that also uses the platform of social media to interact directly with the patients to provide clinical help.

Following are the challenge yet to be covered in research paper: –

1. Identity theft: there is rise in identity thieves that gather personal data from varied social media websites. Even if, people save their account by enabling highest security settings, there are some ways for identity thief to get data. Many social media sites have the data that is needed like email address or birthday. It is usually common for a thief to hack the email accounts by using the information from social media (Khan et al, 2014).
2. Social profile or computer hacking: hackers have special love for social media and they usually go right to the source to put malicious kind of code. These codes used by the hackers helps them to steal identity, or put virus in the system and limit the bank account data. In addition, short URLs that were created on bit.ly are specifically susceptible from any kind of hackers (Wang et al, 2013).
3. Inadvertent help to the stalkers: while using the social media websites, people usually post the personal information and once this information is posted on online network, it become public and can fall in the wrong hands. More posting of classified information will make the situation more vulnerable for people (He, 2013).

Following are the impacts of challenges: –

1. A widespread practice to gain access of personal data is by clicking the link of forgot password and trying to gain access of the information with the help of email. Once the information is accessed by the hacker, all the information can be easily hacked (Kshetri, 2014).
2. Short URLs can also trick the users into visiting the harmful websites where personal data can be easily compromised since the complete URL cannot be seen.
3. Even with very high security measure, friends, colleagues or even a simple like on networking sites can leak the data about people. The websites that people subscribe to, the apps they download or even the games on social media contain the personal data about people. Each time one must also browse a website, organization can also put invisible kind of market on the computer known as cookies (Zhang et al, 2014).

The issue is increasing with every passing day and security and privacy issues in social media is becoming one of biggest challenge in today’s time. It can only be dealt or resolved when users take a more careful approach to what they can share and its quantity. With the development of different platforms on social media, it is becoming further harder to carefully supervise and save the sites users and their functions since the work of security program become more and more spread out (Moses et al, 2014). While dealing with number of prospective threats that a user is exposed to and most the important network will enable the user to set the present privacy based controls for who has the capacity to see or evaluate the required or crucial information. People can still use social platform for all that they are meaning to achieve however, some extra precaution ensures that the personal data doesn’t get to the wrong people.

Reference

Elmaghraby, A. S., & Losavio, M. M. (2014). Cyber security challenges in Smart Cities: Safety, security and privacy. Journal of advanced research, 5(4), 491-497.

Gritzalis, D., Kandias, M., Stavrou, V., & Mitrou, L. (2014). History of information: the case of privacy and security in social media. In Proc. of the History of Information Conference (pp. 283-310).

He, W. (2013). A survey of security risks of mobile social media through blog mining and an extensive literature search. Information Management & Computer Security, 21(5), 381-400.

Khan, G. F., Swar, B., & Lee, S. K. (2014). Social media risks and benefits: A public sector perspective. Social Science Computer Review, 32(5), 606-627.

Kshetri, N. (2014). Big data? s impact on privacy, security and consumer welfare. Telecommunications Policy, 38(11), 1134-1145.

Moses, R. E., McNeese, L. G., Feld, L. D., & Feld, A. D. (2014). Social media in the health-care setting: benefits but also a minefield of compliance and other legal issues. The American journal of gastroenterology, 109(8), 1128.

Ventola, C. L. (2014). Social media and health care professionals: benefits, risks, and best practices. Pharmacy and Therapeutics, 39(7), 491.

Wang, Y., Leon, P. G., Scott, K., Chen, X., Acquisti, A., & Cranor, L. F. (2013, May). Privacy nudges for social media: an exploratory Facebook study. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 763-770). ACM.

Zhang, K., Liang, X., Shen, X., & Lu, R. (2014). Exploiting multimedia services in mobile social networks from security and privacy perspectives. IEEE Communications Magazine, 52(3), 58-65.