Threat To Privacy The Social Media

Is Social Media A Serious Threat To Privacy?

The dynamics of today’s world have been changed rapidly over time and have transformed into the shape of what it is today. The key factor contributing to this change is globalization that has forced individuals and countries to emphasize inter-connectivity. World’s population has been increasing apace, and so is the need for connectivity.

Social media is the way of connecting with people who have similar interests and thus create virtual communities with the help of online social networks (OSNs) (Ali et al., 2018). It is a type of social graph that connects people of related interests so that edges and connectivity points are easier to track. Cloud storage and internet connectivity make it easier for social media sites to be accessed and traced from anywhere worldwide. Therefore, sensitive data and personal information are exposed on these pages, which can cause contextual integrity concerns for greater groups with political or religious affiliations if not safeguarded by official protections. Handing over this private information to any third party for research, commercial, or fraud purposes would be serious, for which OSN uses ‘anonymization’ strategies to keep the data preserved.

The internet has provided useful and valuable means for staying connected, especially through social media networks. If used positively, it has numerous benefits, especially for the industries that want to make their presence known to the entire world (Hollingsworth, 2019). It is the most rapid, convenient, and free-of-cost method for promoting a company’s products and services online to millions of users around the globe. Making networks and partnerships creates opportunities for availability for the firms. Instant help could be obtained through social media platforms with direct communication. Relevant links are generated by the social media information pages that lead the user to the company’s web pages, directly and undeniably influencing website traffic.

Along with the benefits that social media offers, there are some drawbacks as well, particularly privacy. A large part of the conversations on social media platforms is online, which means they could be seen by anyone from any part of the world. The reason for saying so is that online hackers are always preying on grabbing these accounts and the related personal information of the online users. 13% of the total American population has their social media accounts hacked by unapproved users (Tulane University, n.a.). The malware is forced into their systems, and the information is swiped for fraud and theft purposes.

The use of social media sites is also now seen in manipulating opinions for political and social concerns. For example, there are groups on social media platforms controlled by unauthorized individuals, who, when tracked, have no proper identities and are hard to track. They are responsible for degrading or promoting one of the parties so that interference in elections could be made or disruptions in social campaigns could be launched for the personal benefits of one group.

Numerous other threats exist on the social media websites, such as phishing attacks, evil twin attacks, identity theft invasion, cyberbullying, and even physical offenses (Senthil, Saravanakumar & Deepa, 2016, p. 117). These collectively could be categorized into three dimensions: a privacy breach, passive attacks, and active attacks. Each social media website has its privacy settings that can block the online attackers from entering into personal space, encompassing restricting the visibility, controlling who can send messages, automatically blocking the spam users, setting alerts for unknown logins, not allowing unknown people to tag in photos, and setting the restrictions for unknown people of finding on social media pages.