Social Media: Privacy and Security Risks

This assignment delves into the critical issue of privacy and security risks associated with social media. It examines how websites, apps, and even games collect personal data through user activity and cookies. The text highlights the increasing challenges posed by evolving platforms and the need for users to adopt cautious approaches to sharing information. It emphasizes the importance of setting strong privacy controls and implementing preventative measures to safeguard sensitive data in the digital landscape.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES ASSOCIATED WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
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Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Summary of research paper on social media..............................................................................3
Challenges not covered in research paper..................................................................................5
Impact of the challenges in real world.......................................................................................6
Significant lessons......................................................................................................................6
Reference....................................................................................................................................8

Introduction
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.
Summary of research paper on social media
Research paper 1
History of Information: The case of Privacy and Security in Social Media
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).
Research paper 2
Social media and health care professionals: Benefits, Risks and Best Practices
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.
Challenges not covered in research paper
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).
Impact of the challenges in real world
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).
Significant lessons

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.