Facebook, Twitter and other social networks expose your personal information far beyond your group of friends and remember that really you are not customers of them, you’re their product.
Users need to remember that the Social Networks makes money from its advertisers, not from the users; and the advertisers want to get their message out to as many people as possible; because this fact, they share your information to everyone, not just your “friends”; and most recently for example Facebook’s facial recognition technology automatically suggests that friends tag you, unless you turn it off.
The most popular scams on social networks include cross-site scripting, clickjacking, survey scams and identity theft, but far from this technical breach, we are our first security hole.
We publish everything from our day to day activities, leaving a virtual trail of breadcrumbs about our behavior, what we like and dislike, our way to think and watch the world and more important when and where we do all of our things and our relationship with others in our environment; and there is the social networks’ business, they collect (and we are happy to provide it) and process and catalog all our information and they sell it in a direct way to organizations, governmental and private agencies, and in an indirect way when publicity is included in the social networks’ site.
I remember one time my best friend told me, “If I am not capable to keep my own secrets how I will demand to other to keep it”, and this is a big true at the social networks; we published our private life without fear, and really is a good thing that there are certain ethical restrictions because otherwise I do not even want to imagine the things would be published without any shyness.
At Valhala Networks and all the information security professionals in general, work hard to keep your information safe, but our efforts are futile without the final user awareness about his own privacy.
My free advice as security consultor, please think twice about the consequences before publish anything in a social network because the internet don’t forget and just remember, “Do not be fooled, if you do not pay for the product, then the product is you !!!”
Julian Bolivar-Galeno is an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Architect whose expertise is in telecommunications, security and embedded systems. He works in BolivarTech focused on decision making, leadership, management and execution of projects oriented to develop strong security algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) research and its applicability to smart solutions at mobile and embedded technologies, always producing resilient and innovative applications.