Image taken from google.com/images
Online social network sites such as Facebook have experienced remarkable user growth in the past several years. Facebook alone reports over 200 million users worldwide, with 100 million of those signing on every day, as said by Besmer, and Lipford (2009). Additionally, a number of social network sites are creating platforms for a variety of applications that build off of users’ social network, according to Felt and Evans (2008). Thus, online social networking communities are becoming an increasingly important aspect of our digital lives, mediated by an increasingly complex underlying architecture.
Privacy issues have become a real concern for many users, as online social networks such as Facebook are expanding rapidly; it is possible for somebody’s profile to be connected to hundreds of peers openly, and thousands of others through the network’s connections through friends of friends, whereby total strangers who get your number via Facebook can contact you. Related avenues such as “Newsfeed”, which informs other users about their activities on Facebook, add to the problem of private and often sensitive information being freely and publicly provided to others.
Other issues such as social engineering are a well-known practice in computer security, that is, to obtain confidential information by manipulating genuine users said Mitnick, Simon, And, Wozniak (2002). Using such methods on Facebook is very simple - just ask to be added as someone’s friend. The surprisingly high success rate of this practice was recently demonstrated by a Facebook user who, using an automatic script, contacted 250,000 users of Facebook across the country and asked to be added as their friend. As a result, a staggering 75,000 users accepted. Thirty percent of Facebook users are willing to make all of their profile information available to a random stranger and his network of friends, according to The Federal Trade Commission (1999) in their study of Facebook privacy issues.
The blue area represents the default settings regarding the availability of your personal data. As you can see, the default settings allow a large set of personal information to be shared among your Facebook connections as well as the outside world. As a member of Facebook, you must manually change your settings to make sure you have your preferred level of privacy. Don't assume this is taken care of for you by the application!
Images from http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2010/05/facebook-and-privacy-issues-reflections.html
I believe that notable changes in online privacy issues will only come from a gradual maturity of common sense regarding what is appropriate to post in social networking forums. Sadly, this is not an easy task as carelessness concerning privacy issues will continue to occur. Revealing this sort of information needs to be viewed as similar to going alone to the apartment of a person you’ve met via the Internet. It is vital that Facebook users everywhere appreciate the potential for mis-use of the information by administrators. The environment that Facebook creates should be one that fosters good decision-making. Privacy should be the default, encryption should be the norm, and Facebook should take strides to inform users of their rights and responsibilities.
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Reference
Terremark Worldwide, Inc. “Facebook Expands Operations at Terremark's NAP West Facility" http://www.terremark.com/about/news.aspx , Accessed 15th June 2010
K. Mitnick, W. Simon, and S. Wozniak. The art of deception: controlling the human element of security. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Federal Trade Commission, Privacy Online: Report to Congress, 1999.
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/06/onlineprofilingreportjune2000.pdf Accessed 15th June 2010
“Interactive Multimedia Technology” http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2010/05/facebook-and-privacy-issues-reflections.html
Besmer, A., Lipford, H.R. (2009). Users’ (Mis)Conceptions of Social Applications. Unpublished manuscript. http://hci.sis.uncc.edu/pubs/visibleflows.pdf
Felt, A., and Evans, D. (2008). Privacy Protection for Social Networking APIs, In the Proceedings of the Workshop on Web 2.0 Security & Privacy, May 2008. http://hci.sis.uncc.edu/pubs/visibleflows.pdf
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