During my analysis of the pros and cons of the social networks I decided to do a research about the threats that the Social Networks could pose to society and found out that both corporations and individuals have been affected by the use of social networks.
In the one hand, According to an article posted by the Telegraph, a newspaper from England, the use of social networks during work has cost to British companies at least 6.5 Billions of pounds and some of these companies have decided to block the access to web sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo because their personnel spends at least 30 minutes a day on social networking sites during work hours and uses 30% of their bandwidth. (Please find attached the article just mentioned)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/2783040/UK-takes-andpound6.5bn-hit-from-Facebook-andamp-company.html
In addition, many companies consider the use of social networks as a potential risk to their intellectual property since employees can easily share confidential information of the company which can affect the performance of the corporations in an important manner.
In the other hand, individuals can and have been easily affected by the use of social networks like the ones mentioned above since they post their personal information and therefore make it available to an enormous amount of people. According to the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report for the second half of 2007 reveals there were 87,963 "phishing hosts" for that period, an increase of 167 per cent from the first half of 2007.Phishing hosts act as fake websites, collecting information including login and password details from unsuspecting users.
In regards to this subject, last march, officials from Interpol and the UK government gave out a warning that criminals might be taking a keen interest in what you leave behind in social networking sites. And a confirmation of this is an experiment conducted by BBC which consisted on creating a fake ID of a girl and inviting 100 persons to become a friend of her, then selecting a person from those who accepted to be a friend of the fake girl proved that they were able to gather enough information of the victim to open an online bank account in his name and successfully apply for a credit card
As a conclusion, the potential benefits of social networks are offset by the threats posed by the use of these communication channels, and both organizations and individuals should perform a the cost-benefit analysis before using them.
(Please see attached the links to the articles mentioned above)
http://www.theage.com.au/news/security/fraud-rampant-in-social-networks/2008/04/09/1207420438083.html
http://www.419legal.org/blog/2008/04/09/social-networking-risks-how-safe-are-you-with-revealing-personal-information-in-social-networking-sites/
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/credit-and-loans/idfraud/article.html?in_article_id=425595&in_page_id=&ito=1565
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2 comments:
OK, but this post leaves me hoping that you could give us your opinion on the threat/benefit trade-off. For example, these articles outline the pitfalls of an open network environment, but is forbidding access the only/best thing businesses can do to mitigate their dangers?
I agree with you professor, but the point I was trying to make by posting those articles is that the most of the times, both corporations and individuals get involve in a network without having a real knowledge of it.
In regards to your comment, I think "Judgement" is the best tool that can be used to mitigate the risks related to open access networks. For example, some companies have implemented "Non Disclosure Agreements" or "Conflict of Interests Statements" to set up a frame of the type of activities that can pose a risk for the company and the commitment of the employees to protect the best interests of the company. In addition, people using networks should have a basic knowledge of what type of information to post and what type do not, and also know about the most popular types of "physing" scams performed by hackers in the web.
At the end, the more knowledge we have about the social networks we are in, the best results we can obtain.
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