Policy Report on Social Media Surveillance

This policy report discusses the issues and impacts of social media surveillance, including security and privacy concerns. It also provides recommendations for addressing these problems and explores the necessity and proportionality of using technology for surveillance.

Running head: POLICY REPORT
Policy Report
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
1 Problem Statement........................................................................................................................3
2 Evidence.......................................................................................................................................3
3 Most significant issue...................................................................................................................5
3.1 Groups affecting the technology............................................................................................6
3.2 Is the use of technology necessary or proportionate..............................................................7
4 Recommendations.........................................................................................................................7
4.1 Addressing of the problems...................................................................................................7
4.2 Should the technology be used?............................................................................................8
4.3 Conditions useful for the technology.....................................................................................8
5 Reference....................................................................................................................................10

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1 Problem Statement
The application of social media is increasing every day as it is being used for business
purposes as well as personal purposes, this is causing numerous issues such as the security and
privacy issues, discriminations and concerns like accountability and transparency. The paper will
also focus on the application of surveillance of social media by security intelligence agencies.
2 Evidence:
According to Duffy and Chan (2018), social media applications are increasingly being
used for personal and business purposes. The researcher focused on the surveillance of various
social actors in different types of ways. The importance of digital reputation is highlighted in the
paper with primary importance and at the same time the researcher also focused on self-
monitoring of the activities in the social media platforms which might be useful to minimize the
security and the privacy issues. Transparency can be improved in the business processes if social
media practices are properly checked (Vázquez and Calatayud, 2018) as stated by the researcher.
The most significant unit of the paper focuses on the user-generated data which are very prone to
cybersecurity issues. The researchers of the paper also focus on the application of the phishing
emails to secure the data from the registered users of different types of social media platforms.
The main advantage of the paper is that it helps in identifying all the methods by which the
security and privacy of data may be compromised and the limitations of the paper is that it fails
to recognize how the future security threats of the social media platforms can be mitigated.
As discussed by Jungwirth, Barnett & Badawy (2017), there are different types of
security issues in our society which can be mitigated with the use of the social media. However,
there are different security issues of social media which were highlighted in the paper. The

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researchers of the paper focus on the incident of October 2009, when users of Microsoft’s
Hotmail were asked to changed their passwords due to a privacy breach in their system. Phishing
emails were used in this privacy breach. The researcher of the paper also focuses on the security
issues of October 2010, when the Facebook corporation admitted that the data from their users
are accessed by popular applications. The researcher focused on the impact of the security breach
and its impact on our social lives. The importance of data consistency and data reliability was
highlighted in the paper with prime importance. The prime advantage of the paper is that is states
about the glitches of the social media in a detailed way and it also presents the list of recent
security concerns associated with the application of social media for both business and personal
use. The other advantage of the paper is that it explains the role of the third party applications for
most of the security concerns for the social media (Thurman 2018). The paper hugely highlights
the importance of the privacy impact assessment to deal with the security issues associated with
the business organization. The model proposed in the paper helps in understanding the progress
of the business organizations as they make the changes to in their environment to deal with the
security concerns (Sidana et al. 2018). How social media application causes huge problems in
our daily life was stated in the paper. Thus the paper helps in understanding the different issues
associated with social media with the help of appropriate incidents which happened in recent
years.
As stated by Mazer et al. (2015), there are lots of problems which are introduced with the
increased use of social media surveillance. The researcher focused on the misutilization of the
social media accounts which are hacked and it leads to security issues and business loss for the
business organizations. The researcher focused on a couple of issues of Twitter which caused
security concerns such as identity theft. This paper also focusses on the unethical act of the third

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party applications users by the Facebook users all over the world. Data aggregators were used in
transferring the information of the users collected from the applications when the users choose
the policies without even going through it. The researcher was very much successful to make the
readers understand about the use of the extracted data, as it can have used by the cyber criminals
in different kinds of unethical practices (Wright and Raab 2012). The researcher also focused on
the privacy breach which occurred in the year 2011 in California, when a dataset of 2 million
customers of health insurance policy was encrypted from the data centre of IBM. The researcher
also highlighted the data which was stolen from the Sony PlayStation subscribers in the year
2011. The company lost around $171 million USD for the protection of credit cards for their
clients as stated by the author. The researchers of the papers successfully identified the different
issues which were created due to the use of social media applications in recent times.
3 Most significant issue:
The foremost determination of the paper is to focus on the most significant issues and its
impact. Reduced visibility can be considered as one of the most important impacts of social
security issues coming from different social medium platforms. Criminal activities have been
increased as they found new and innovative ways to extract money from the users of social
media platforms. Maintenance of public order is getting difficult each day as due to the issues
that are being caused (Larson et al. 2013). Enforcement of the law and order in the country is
getting complicated as new and innovative methods are steadily coming into the market.
National security is one of the worst affected areas among the other areas as these security issues
are resulting in different types of terrorist attacks. The existing data protection laws are getting
outdated each day with the use of illegal and unauthorized software's (Pötzsch 2018). The
discussed social media issues have different kinds of impacts on our society, only the negative

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impacts will be discussed in the paper. Personal information can be collected from the cookies of
the advanced systems. Communication channel between individuals are needed in both the
public and the private sector industries and there are security issues in those communications
channels also. The privacy of the users is getting compromised each and every time there are
privacy and security issues. The other issues which emerges due to the use of the social media
are cyberbullying, sexting, sleep deprivation and internet addiction (Whiting and Williams
2013). These have a very negative impact on our society causing lack of emotional connection
and bad communication skills, these are the most common impact on the users of the social
media platforms. The security and the privacy issues results in the violation of the human rights
also.
The extensive use of social media applications for both business and personal use has a
huge impact on human rights and it is the reason behind the governments playing an active role
in minimizing its impact. Many countries have a set of procedures they follow during the time of
crisis as there are situations when social media are not used for the right cause (Mueller and
Salathé 2018). Social media are used in the middle east countries for illegal and unethical
activities. There are numerous obligations of the social media applications which are needed to
be followed to get the desired results.
3.1 Groups affecting the technology
The younger generations of the society are mostly affected due to the privacy and
security issues of the social media surveillance. The employees of business organizations are also
impacted by this security issue as they can have their identity stolen (Tsay-Vogel, Shanahan and
Signorielli 2018). Inspite of having a huge impact on our personal and professional life the social
media surveillance can considerable amount of challenges and issue which are needed to be

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minimized so that the desired results from the social media platforms can be obtained. The
application of effective social media strategy is required so that the issues and the challenges
associated with social media can be minimized to a significant extent. Every user of social media
platforms falls into the category of these issues.
3.2 Is the use of technology necessary or proportionate
The application of the social media surveillance is very much helpful in business
organizations as it helps to improve their relationship with their clients (Fuchs et al. 2013). The
efficiency of the business processes can also be determined with the help of surveillance in the
social media pages. The use of the social media applications such as Facebook sand WhatsApp is
one of the main communication channels all around the world. These communication channels
can also be used by business organization in different kinds of business processes such as
understanding the market position. Getting involved with customers is very much important in
business operations, this is possible with the help of these social media platforms. Customers can
send feedback to the internal stakeholders of the organization with the help of the social media
platforms, this helps in improving the customer satisfaction which ultimately lead to business
profits (Lyon and Trottier 2013). The current business trends can also be identified with the help
of the social media surveillance and it can be also said that the application of the social media
platforms is very much important to understand the business goals of the business organizations.
Along with that, it can be also said that the application of social media surveillance is also used
to increase the business reach.
4 Recommendations:

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4.1 Addressing of the problems
There are different categories of issues associated with the use of social media
surveillance which are needed to be addressed as soon as possible in order to get the desired
results out of those technologies. The problem of violation of human rights can be effectively
addressed with the help of stringent government legislation as the strict protocols can be useful
to protect the human rights. The different categories of social injustice which is common to the
users of the social media platforms can be successfully addressed with the use of the social
media policy which again falls under the category of government legislation. The cybersecurity
issues associated with the application of social media platforms can be minimized with the help
of anti-malware software (Chowdhury, Zhang and Yu 2018). The installation of the third party
application in the major social media platforms should be one be done after going through each
of the minute details of the installation page which we accept it blindly.
4.2 Should the technology be used?
Considering both the advantages such as the enhancement of efficient and productivity in
the business organizations, and evaluation of the performance of business organizations and the
disadvantages such as the privacy and the security issues and the monitoring time required for
the following up the developments in the social media page, it can be said that the social media
surveillance should be incorporated for both personal and professional projects. The issues and
challenges associated with the use of the social media surveillance should be solved purposefully
with the help of the stringent regulation coming from the government officials and a dedicated
and experienced social media team can also be very much helpful to maintain the efficiency of
the social media marketing. Thus it can be said that the use of social media surveillance should
be used for both personal and professional purpose.

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4.3 Conditions useful for the technology
The above unit of the paper focused briefly on the advantages and the limitations
associated with the use of the social media surveillance, the unit concluded with a note that the
use of the social media surveillance should not be stopped. The foremost determination of this
unit of the paper is to focus on the conditions which are required for getting the desired results
from the social media surveillance. The prime condition has to be the implementation of the data
mining tools in social media surveillance. The other important thing which is important for the
effective working of the social media surveillance is clarity of service, all the parties who are
involved in the project should be aware of the application and the future scope of social media
surveillance. The important condition required for the implementation of the social media
surveillance is the protection of the human rights with the help of the intelligence agencies and
the access of the intelligence agencies should be also limited by the government officials so that
there is no threat to the national security. The following conditions can be recommended which
will help the to get the desired results.
o Application of data mining tools along with social media surveillance.
o Proper planning with the help of IT governance plan is highly recommended.
o Clarity of service should be maintained in the environment where it will be
applied.
o Protection of human rights with the help of government agencies.

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5 Reference
Chowdhury, S., Zhang, C. and Yu, P.S., 2018. Multi-Task Pharmacovigilance Mining from
Social Media Posts. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.06294.
Duffy, B.E. and Chan, N.K., 2018. “You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined
surveillance across social media platforms. New Media & Society, p.1461444818791318.
Fuchs, C., Boersma, K., Albrechtslund, A. and Sandoval, M. eds., 2013. Internet and
surveillance: The challenges of Web 2.0 and social media (Vol. 16). Routledge.
Jungwirth, P., Barnett, T., & Badawy, A. H. (2017, May). Rootkits and the OS friendly
microprocessor architecture. In Cyber Sensing 2017 (Vol. 10185, p. 1018503). International
Society for Optics and Photonics.
Larson, H.J., Smith, D.M., Paterson, P., Cumming, M., Eckersberger, E., Freifeld, C.C., Ghinai,
I., Jarrett, C., Paushter, L., Brownstein, J.S. and Madoff, L.C., 2013. Measuring vaccine
confidence: analysis of data obtained by a media surveillance system used to analyse public
concerns about vaccines. The Lancet infectious diseases, 13(7), pp.606-613.
Lyon, D. and Trottier, D., 2013. Key features of social media surveillance. In Internet and
Surveillance (pp. 109-125). Routledge.
Mazer, J.P., Thompson, B., Cherry, J., Russell, M., Payne, H.J., Kirby, E.G. and Pfohl, W., 2015.
Communication in the face of a school crisis: Examining the volume and content of social media
mentions during active shooter incidents. Computers in Human Behavior, 53, pp.238-248.
Mueller, M. and Salathé, M., 2018. Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social
Media Data and Crowdsourcing. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.05491.

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Pötzsch, H., 2018. Archives and identity in the context of social media and algorithmic analytics:
Towards an understanding of iArchive and predictive retention. New Media & Society,
p.1461444817748483.
Sidana, S., Amer-Yahia, S., Clausel, M., Rebai, M., Mai, S.T. and Amini, M.R., 2018. Health
monitoring on social media over time. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
Thurman, N., 2018. Social media, surveillance, and news work: On the apps promising
journalists a “crystal ball”. Digital Journalism, 6(1), pp.76-97.
Tsay-Vogel, M., Shanahan, J. and Signorielli, N., 2018. Social media cultivating perceptions of
privacy: A 5-year analysis of privacy attitudes and self-disclosure behaviors among Facebook
users. new media & society, 20(1), pp.141-161.
Vázquez, A.S. and Calatayud, M.M., 2018. Mobilisation and surveillance on social media: The
ambivalent case of the anti-austerity protests in Spain (2011–2014). In Protests in the
Information Age (pp. 21-39). Routledge.
Whiting, A. and Williams, D., 2013. Why people use social media: a uses and gratifications
approach. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 16(4), pp.362-369.
Wright, D. and Raab, C.D., 2012. Constructing a surveillance impact assessment. Computer Law
& Security Review, 28(6), pp.613-626.