Burak Ozdemir ’s Blog » Blog Archive » Is your information safe with social networks?

Social networks in the form of Yahoo or MSN communities always existed. But today social networking has acquired altogether different connotation and size. MySpace is known to be first social network and today with 20 million users, it tops the pack of social networking sites.

Whether we like or dislike emergence of such networking sites, fact is we cannot wish it away. There is money to be made from such data mined, and this would not stop. Instead of being paranoid about the cyber crime in any form, we need to develop strengths to deal with it and tap huge possibilities of networked world.

These social networking provides immensely useful services as providing platform for people to share their thoughts; performing unofficial background checks; building up a brand; expanding customer base virally; increasing traffic for online content. Many hopeful 2008 US presidential candidates have set up their profiles on such networking sites to woo young voters.

Are these social networks safe?

Recently many social networking sites are in news for all the wrong reasons. While sharing information on net, lack of physical interaction offers users false sense of anonymity and they share some information which they would not have shared in person. The more information a person shares, the easier he becomes targets of fraudsters. Even seeming trivial information as sharing your date of birth, mother’s maiden name and your address is enough to misuse your credit card.

There are inherent design flaws in most such networking sites. Tons of spam is being posted daily in various bulletins as a result of phishing. Distance afforded by internet emboldens fraudsters to cheat gullible people.

For victims of fraud through such networking sites, legal remedies are not easy. In a Feb 2007 judgment by a Texas court, where parents of a girl sued MySpace for negligence for their girl had been sexually assaulted, it was held that protecting the girl was duty of her parents and not of MySpace. China is one of the few countries that have placed restrictions on working of such sites. In MySpace-China, no discussion on religion, politics, Dalai Lama and few other issues is allowed.

Even such networking sites are not safe. In May 2006, MySpace, was hacked, personal profiles of users stolen, and hackers demanded $15000 in lieu of not sharing their hacking secrets.

The problem with most sites is that they do not want to invest in security. Despite Livejournal’s popularity with more than 1.5 million users, its CEO openly admitted that security is not his first priority.

Facebook - Fastest growing social network

Part reason for growth in popularity of Facebook is its controlled and conservative against anarchy in MySpace. Its users can limit their profile information that could be viewed by visitors. It also limits the capability of web-crawlers to harvest information about it users.

Future of Facebook

Facebook has become a one stop portal for all content and interaction. Today, it is about the same size as Microsoft was about decade and half ago. It was launch of Windows that made Microsoft of the size what it is today. Facebook’s growth is equally rapid. Its acquisition of Parakey says one thing loud and clear that it wants to become the foremost destination on the web. Facebook has become more of desktop than an internet site. The kind of venture capital that is flowing in it is clear indicator of its becoming the Web OS provider, sooner than we may think.

This scenario may appear far fetched today, but remember even Google was a search engine one day. While in Google, its different products as search engine, GMail, Google calendar are not linked together, in Facebook, every thing is interlinked.

Is information truly confidential with Facebook?

Though today Facebook’s policies declare that it will never sell any of your information, but then how come it is implementing targeted ads to its users, is it not amounting to sale of information to its advertisers? It is already in news that Facebook plans to let advertisers use profiles of people who have bought stuff online and then use that person’s photo or info in an online ad targeted at his friends in his social network.

Whether we like or dislike emergence of such networking sites, fact is we cannot wish it away. There is money to be made from such data mined, and this would not stop. We cannot wish away the fact that more and more part of our lives is going to be managed online. Instead of being paranoid about the cyber crime in any form, we need to develop strengths to deal with it and tap huge possibilities of networked world.

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