“Privacy concerns swirled around Facebook again after an employee of a firm called Skull Security compiled and released personal data on more than 100 million Facebook users”, (Figueroa 2010). Skull Security said it was pointing out vulnerabilities in Facebook privacy controls.
In response to this Facebook says, “ these information are similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook’,’ (Figueroa, 2010), but are the users of Facebook subscribed to use their personal information by third party organizations?
‘Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies: despite promises they don't share such information without consent’, (Steel & Vascellaro, 2010).
Despite of security issues: users of facebook is on the rise. 'Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced: number of people accessing Facebook through mobiles – tripled from 65 million to 200 million',(Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 2010).
“Facebook has changed its privacy settings twice since last summer. Both times, some of users’ privacy settings have defaulted back to the public options, so users unaware of the changes won’t switch their privacy setting back, or that they won’t be aware of how to do so in the first place”, (Figueroa, 2010).
To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options, (The New York Time, 2010).
Many of the core obligations contained in the Information Privacy Principles do not apply where the information is “publicly available information”, (Gunasekara and Toy 2008, p.202). So as users of social networks we have an obligation for ourselves to protect the information from public.
A study done by Krishnamurthy and Wills (2009, p.12 ), with popular Online Social Networks (OSNs) show that:
- Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is constantly leak to one or more third parties via Request-URLs, Refer headers and cookies.
- Two of the OSNs directly leak pieces of PII to third parties with one of the OSNs leaking zip code and email information about users that may not be even publicly available within the OSN itself.
- Leakage extends to external OSN applications, which not only have access to user profile information, but leak a user’s OSN identifier to other third parties.
“Some applications raise discrete privacy issues of their own. For example, the Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) is an application, accessed via Facebook or mobile phone that provides users with a detailed map of their friend’s locations”, (Gunasekara & Toy 2008, p.193). These are extreme privacy issues which can bring lot of problems to users and their personal security as the connection between cyberspace and real world becomes very real.
(Image source:http://stuff.tv) .The US Company behind the technology says the service users can choose whether to be visible or invisible. It will cost mobile users 50p per sniff and has already gone down a storm in Sweden, where 80,000 people have signed up, (Independent Television News Limited 2008).
References:
- Figueroa, A 2010, ‘Privacy issues hit Facebook again’, The Christian Science Monitor, viewed 4 November 2010, < http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-economy/2010/0730/Privacy-issues-hit-Facebook-again>
- Gunasekara, G & Toy, A 2008, ‘ “MySpace” or public space: the relevance of data protection laws to online social networking’, New Zealand universities law review, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 191-214.
- Krishnamurthy, B & Wills, CE 2009, ‘On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks’, viewed 4 November 2010, <www2.research.att.com/~bala/papers/wosn09.pdf>
- Steel, E & Vascellaro, JE 2010, ‘Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole’, The Wall Street Journal, viewed 4 Novemeber 2010, < http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html>
No comments:
Post a Comment