The explosion in worldwide use of social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter has resulted in the amount of private material being uploaded has increased exponentially. Users share opinions, experiences, advice and much much more. A study released last year reports that there are serious flaws in the privacy policies of social network sites; and concludes that privacy standards need to be widely implemented in order to prevent unauthorized abuse of personal information.
Social network sites are special in the sense that they encourage – and build on – people posting information in their own name, the concept would be rather flaw if accounts were anonymous. This puts high demands on security and privacy standards to prevent personal information being abused. A 2009 Physorg study of 45 social networks reported “serious concerns” about how the sites protected personal information.
Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, which each boast user-bases of hundreds of millions, are becoming an ever larger part of our everyday life both online as well as offline. For instance, the impact on “real life” of online actions has seen people fired following statements made on Facebook.
As people put more and more private material on the internet – whether it being vacation photos, opinions about work and politics or banking information – the question of who is ultimately responsible for the protection of such material is increasingly raised? The Physorg study states:
Some 90% of sites, for example, needlessly required a full name or date of birth for permission to join. 80% failed to use standard encryption protocols to protect sensitive user data from hackers. And 71% reserved the right to share user data with third parties in their privacy policies.
Even if the concept of “social network privacy” is somewhat of an oxymoron, it is important that these sites only share what people willingly agree to share. It is therefore vital that social networking sites provide secure protection to avoid the hi-jacking of accounts.
The issue is complicated by the presence of third parties. Many sites state within their privacy policy that third party compliance to the network site’s privacy policy cannot be guaranteed (e.g. Facebook), which is an issue due to the fact that for many sharing though third-party application is a primary attraction to a social networking site.
Similarly sites such as Facebook and Twitter began as small endeavors and have grown far beyond initial expectations, both in the extent and speed of public adoption. As such necessary privacy controls have only become a necessity after the fact and often difficult to implement due to specific implementations and legacy code.
The need for privacy standards deployment is obvious. It is assuring that policy makers recognize this need (e.g. the Madrid Privacy Declaration) but market actors need to respond as well. And given the likeliness of people’s continued need/will to be active and visible on the web the amount of personal material placed online will not decrease.
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