Many of you reading this article will have (or had) at some point in your online life, a membership to a social network. Be it Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Last Fm, Bebo or any of the countless social network apps that exist on the web.
What I aim to do with this article is to create an open discussion about why social networking has not taken our privacy and security seriously enough.
Lets start by taking a look at the two most dominant players in the social networking field and some basic history:
FaceBook was originally started for a closed community of students who were able to keep in touch with each other sharing information privately but requiring user authentication.
In September 2006, it became open to everyone and from there on it escalated to insane proportions with a huge global audience.
With this massive explosion of interest came a big turning point. FaceBook threw away user authentication. Ouch! Bye bye user privacy! This opened a gateway for people signing up to give false personal details about themselves.
The main purpose of user authentication was to prevent users giving false details and to keep information private. Now this has vanished, you can be signed up as Joe Bloggs from Outer Mongolia who is a 99 year old devout Jedi Knight that practices Kung-Fu every thursday, has zombie called ‘Jahulai’ who wants to eat your brains and likes listening to Coldplay!
But still, it is so easy to share too much information which will be read and monitored by sources and individuals you will be completely unaware of. Take for example FaceBooks’ Beacon Ad Service, here members receive ’suprise gifts’ for adding an application to their profile. What users are totally unaware of is that these ‘ads’ broadcast information about users’ activity on third-party partner sites to their friends’ Facebook newsfeeds. And what’s more, even when you are not even signed in, your online presence is being monitored by retailers belonging to these third party web sites.
MySpace
In 2002 (In it’s initial conception), MySpace was going to be a leading online data storage and sharing site. In 2004 it became a social network which gained popularity in the music scene and was a year later bought by Rupert Murdoch. Now here comes the big sea change.
With it’s increasingly growing popularity came the demand for more and more ‘things’ to add to users’ profiles. Now we have Flash slideshows, videos, huge banner ads, custom profiles to make your eyes bleed, music players and jukeboxes all within a beautiful (ahem..) table based layout which will load in the time it takes to make a decent cup of coffee! You want valid XHTML/CSS, - Forget it! Tom just wants you to click away and make friends. Oh and don’t get me started on MySpace and FaceBooks’ Accessibility issues, I could write a book on that!
Despite security measures implemented by MySpace, we still get excessive spam flooding MySpace in the form of ‘ladies’ wishing to be your friend, Foreign friend ad requests which are really North African scams merchants pleading “Dear Sar (sic) please could you store some money for Mr….. all we need is your sort code etc etc”, hacked profiles which will mass mail spam adverts on to your friends’ profile pages, or even worse compromise your profile, personal data and on to your bank account, I could go on…. all because there is no real concrete user authentication - you could be anyone and do anything!
FaceSpace or MyBook?
Can you see where this is heading? Both social networks are becoming so alike and share many of the same problems which can compromise your security and privacy that surely sometime soon the bubble will burst and people will go elsewhere and on to the ‘next big thing’. Hopefully ‘the next big thing’ will learn the lessons of MySpace and FaceBook and take users’ security and privacy seriously.
Not Just The ‘Big Two’
A tiresome trend that is growing on one of my favourite social networks (Twitter), is the user who chooses to follow you in the hope that you will follow them. If you choose to follow this person, you will find when you log in to your Twitter account, that person will post almost continually so that your twitter updates are full of useless information that you do not wish to read. These sad individuals are usually marketing people looking to boost their on line presence to show how ‘popular’ they are.
Let’s Discuss It!
I now leave it over to you to post your thoughts on these issues. If you have any questions or opinions you would like to pass on to me or other users, please feel free to do so in the comments section.
Thanks for your feedback!
John
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