It is interesting to see the development of social networking sites all around the globe. Especially Social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are slowly becoming not only a site in which to post pictures from last weekend, but a site to reconnect with friends, make new friends, find common interest groups, and so on. Clearly, such sites would not be able to be so widely popular, if it weren’t for the general trust that the population has into such media sites. Obviously, when posting one’s name, phone number, address, email, birthday, names of siblings and spouses, etc., there needs to be some sort of force, which will take advantage of that.
Since most people are completely unaware, what is being done with their information, and since this information is widely available and accessible, firms have emerged that specialize in collecting this data. Most firms are doing this mostly to advertise to you with specifically targeted advertisement, tailored to your personal interests. The practice of “screen scraping” (which basically is the practice of going through your social networking sites and creating a personalized profile) has been going on for quite some time already, but it has really taking off in recent years. In the past year alone, US marketing firms have spent 410 Million USD to buy such customer data from firms. And the number is expected to double until 2012 alone.[1]
However, there are much more serious potential problems than directed advertisement. One study I found during the research for this subject described social networking sites as “attractive targets for those with malicious intent” [2]. This study revealed that an average profile provides very accurate information about “her/his home address, her/his pet’s name, where she/he went to school, her/his mother’s maiden name and other family details s – just the kind of information used for security or ‘lost password’ questions for online banking and other confidential services”[2]. While most people would usually not post one’s mother’s maiden name on facebook, it is certainly possible to derive a lot of such information from such sites.
Even worse problems arise, when social networking sites are utilized as not only a means to help criminal activity, but as the primary platform of criminal activity. As one blogger before me mentioned already, social networks are becoming widely used by Neo-Nazi, among other criminal organizations, which use such platforms to organize and to post on activity. However, sites are not only used as a means to meet in a virtual reality. In some cases, Social networking sites have been abused to distribute illegal material, such as child pornography [3], or chat sites have been used by pedophiles to gain access to their victims [4].
In light of such obvious problems with freely releasing personalized information to not only friends, but lso companies and strangers, I wonder why people are still so vehement about keeping their social networking sites alive, even though the dangers are widely known…
[1] http://www.presse-kostenlos.de/internet/item_18920.htm
[2] Grabner-Kräuter, Sonja. Journal of Business Ethics. Web 2.0 Social Networks: The Role of Trust
[4] http://www.20min.ch/news/zuerich/story/10836192
Further sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/screen-scraping
1 comment:
Yours is the latest of several posts on or around this subject, and I would have hoped for a bit more "envelope-pushing" to add to our collective knowledge. Yes, there are dangers of being on an SN site; yes, there are child pornographers etc. out there, but are you really saying what you imply in your conclusion that people should not be on SN sites at all? Is that realistic in the world we live in, or work in?
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