The Risk of Social Media

The Risk of Social Media

Social Media has had a huge influence on how people interact, and is a billion-dollar industry with huge potential even still. With over a billion users, Facebook is without a doubt the biggest social network, meaning it has huge potential for advertisers, businesses and communities to reach as many people as possible. With all the benefits that come with social media, the biggest concern many people have with it are the privacy risks and invasions. This post will cover two areas, using your information for advertising and marketing, and using your information and data for malicious purposes.

Advertising

Many people already know how advertisers use your information and data to their advantage and how they track your internet usage to some degree to cater specific ads to meet your needs. In some ways this can be beneficial, and as a marketing student I am on board with this and its benefits are both good for consumers (better more relevant ads) and businesses (better reach, more effective) but a lot of people tend to have a problem with this, finding it very invasive. What a lot of people don’t understand is how advertisers use your information posted on social media to target advertising. This is the trade-off you have when using a social media site, they (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) give you a service for free and in return use the information you provide them and effectively “sell” it to advertisers.

With marketing being a fairly looked down upon aspect of business (see here for why people hate marketing) many people don’t feel comfortable with their information being used in this way, with some citing this as the reason they don’t use social media.

Hacking

Hackers are constantly prowling social media for new victims, and are getting better and better at it, always finding a way to get around new safe guards. With the recent attacks on google and gmail, and the Sony leaks, as well as the “fappening” (a cloud based privacy issue, see here for our blog post on that) hacking and peoples security on social media and the internet as a whole is becoming a huge concern for some.

Social media sites do allow for you to limit what is shown and to whom, and give users fairly in-depth options to do this and to secure their accounts/ personal information. But as said before, hackers generally always find a way around this, and if the are trying to either stalk you, steal from you, or take over your account, if they are good enough and determined enough they will eventually succeed.

Hackers use a variety of different techniques, from phishing, spyware, key tracking, or viruses, and even if they just get your birth date and name. Identity thieves can use this information to hack your email and then from their they basically have access to all your accounts.

To learn more about how people commit identity theft read here

To learn more about how to secure your accounts click here

And to learn more about being safe online click here

-Zac