Brayansong's Blog

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

Protection of Social Media

 

Now a day social media had become the middle man of connecting people it also present new opportunities for the way people share personal information. Sharing personal information is the key of interacting with other people in social media.

So Share with me What you Share

Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram play a major role in our day to day lives. We like to take photo before we eat and post them on social media, we like to share our best moment with our friends and family through social media, we even use social media to know and ‘stalk’ what our friends and family are doing. But do you know these could cause some privacy risks that threaten your personal information?

I personally don’t like to take photo of my food before I eat, even though if I do I usually keep them in my photo album rather than posting them online. I like to spend great time with my friends and family too, I post some of these meaningful and memorable photos on my social media account to record and show my other family members and friends. You sometimes need to post something online to prove that you are not ‘dead’ (LOL!).

But are these all personal information I share? Unfortunately, no. I still remember the moment I clicked sign-up with submitted an application form that contains my password, contact information such as e-mail, contact number, birthday, gender, and even ‘What’s my mother name’.

Where they keep my personal information, did they protect them or…

Social media company keep your personal information in big databases and ‘pull’ them out when needed. Interesting heh, have you ever wonder if these databases were compromised or these personal information we share were used for company’s revenue? Social Media did not protect your personal information, user should take responsibility of what we share, but social media’s company like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram does.

I personally do trust security implemented by these social media platforms company. Take a look on this article on how Facebook protect their user from hacker and also this about Instagram security implementation. These social media platforms not only implement security on their side but also educate their user about how to protect themselves from identity thefts. However, technologies, algorithm or encryption they use to protect user personal data are mean to be secret.

‘Security is just an illusion’ – is a widely used term in hacker’s community. So no matter how many security were implemented there’s always exception, for example the incident that happened on Twitter that nearly 32 million of Twitter account might be hacked, data breached of Facebook about 50 million that affected United States voters and also Instagram Data Breach incident. These attacks aim to take over user’s personal information for hacker’s profit and also politic influence.

Take a look on privacy policy

Back in my old days when I was taking CAB230 ‘Information Security’ unit in QUT, I did researches on social media privacy policies. An interesting fact that I found out on these three social media platforms is that by default they turned on the ‘sharing’ option that allow them to save user personal information for further usage such as providing advertisement that suits user’s interest also sell or share this information to cooperate third-party for analytical and marketing purpose. Think again, if the product or services is free than probably you are the product. Although these social media’s companies always mention they only use information that user authorized to share, all usage of personal information are actually included in privacy policy.

There’s a research conducted by Pew Research Centre about public knowledge of technology and the web that actually half of online Americans don’t know what privacy policy is. “52% of internet users believe that privacy policies actually ensure the confidentiality of their personal information. (In fact, a privacy policy is simply a legal document that discloses how customer data is managed and used.)” – Aaron Smith. Australian Government website mention that “information you share online may be permanently recorded. Even when you deactivate your account, the information you shared may remain in archived or old versions of websites, or in comments you’ve made on other people’s pages”. The guidance provided by Australian Government is to read the privacy policies of the social networking sites user use and choose the privacy settings that best suit user’s needs.

It’s creepy, but it’s true your personal data actually have a lot of values, in this Big Data era. Be responsible and considerate personal information you share doesn’t only affect you but also other people.

Protect yourself, choose what you share

If you search online about how to protect your personal information you come out with a conclusion – you have no choice and option but to trust social media’s company security since you are using their service and product but you can protect yourself, by choosing what to share. Here’s some tips I concluded to protect your personal information:

  1. Read and understand privacy policy upon or before using.
  2. Choose carefully what you want to share with the social media’s company, and also what you share online.
  3. Don’t share any sensitive information.
  4. Use different password for each social media platform, just in case if compromised your other account won’t get affected.
  5. Don’t click on unverified links, as they might be compromised or used by hacker to steal your personal information.

Take a look on this article provided by Australian Government, that talks about the definition of personal information and also how to protect them.

Not the end of the world

In my conclusion internet and social media are always dangerous, because you never know what will happen to information you share while you are sleeping and who’s on the side while you are interacting with them. However, you can minimize risk by taking steps to protect yourself rather than just overly trusting social media to protect your personal information. Everyone should be responsible to their own personal information. Tell me in comment what you think, do you trust social media to protect your personal information or you would rather trust yourself?

Lastly, I would like to provide some links to privacy policy to help understanding.

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy
Instagram: https://help.instagram.com/155833707900388
Twitter: https://twitter.com/en/privacy

Cheers.

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Social Media

 

In this information explosion era, where information explodes every minute, everyone has an easy access to all sorts of information. Internet creates an easy way for people to communicate using different medium to simplify the way people communicate, breaking down communication barriers such as distance and time which were considerations back in the old days when one tries to bring message from one side to the other.

Why Social Media…

Social media plays a very important part in this era, social media brings people together and make connection closer and easier. In the bright side, using algorithms, Facebook release a ‘six-degress of separation’ theory, determining that we are now a mere 4.74 degree away from another human anywhere on the planet, and so Facebook suggests that the social media is bringing people closer together.

However from the other side of the hand, according to a recent study by Oxford University professor of Evolutionary Anthropology Robin Dunbar, he says that ‘human brain is limited to keeping up with about 150 meaningful relationships, regardless how many Facebook friends you might have.’ But from my point of view, social media do help a lot in connecting people and maintaining relationship especially for long distance relationship, I personally do like to video call my friends and family back in my hometown. Research shows that 27 % of us regularly make video calls to conduct more personal long distance chats with friends and family. Hummmh.. interesting looks like I am one of the 27%…

I also believe that social media do brings connection to people who have the same interest closer. Some social media platform is designed for some specific interest for example: GoodReads – BookLovers, GitHub – Developers, LinkedIn – Professionals, Fleeber– Musicians. Check out this article about how social media brings connection that have the same interest.

My favourite online platform…

My favourite online platform will be Facebook. Been using Facebook since I was 8 years old, 14 years of ‘experience’. Thinking back to the design and services, function provided by Facebook compare to 14 years ago, many has changed.

In my memory, the very first reason I sign up in Facebook is because I wanted to play a game call ‘Restaurant City’ but after constantly using it, I began to make friends online and post online about my emotions, and some art work I did.

I like Facebook because the big community it provides. Today Facebook had becomes an online identity for everyone, statistic released by Facebook on February 2018 shows that there are 1.15 billion mobile daily active users. However, another interesting statistic that that catch my eye while reading this report is that 83 million are fake profiles says CNN, from this statistic we can know that making friend online can be a risk too, you will never know who is on the other side, please feel free read my another article about identity and identities online..

Facebook now also provide features like creating events, group and pages which also allows me to see my company page’s insight and do advertising, and I believe more are yet to come.

Nah, sorry not my favourite…

There are lots of article and people complaining out there about SnapChat’s UX and UI design, such as this article that talks about how SnapChat lost its user because of bad user experience and bad user interface design. This article also discuss about how SnapChat’s bad UX, affects its users, for example some features may not be discovered by user because of the bad design.

I personally don’t really like SnapChat, I feel like it’s not really user-friendly, it takes me more than 4 days to really learn and understand all the features. Although many updates had been applied to it, in the latest update it still doesn’t seems really friendly too me.

Here’s a statistic graph that shows Snapchat’s daily active users over time. You can see how dramatically the number of users drop down and goes up when the new UX and UI was implemented.

Snapchat’s Daily Active Users (2017)

Sorry SnapChat **cry..cry**.

How, why and when do I access Facebook, my favourite online platform…

Most of the time I access to Facebook using my personal computer. As average time I spend in working in front of my computer is more than 5 hours, I less likely wanted to use my mobile phone when I got off from work.

The main reason that I use Facebook is to keep myself update to ‘news’ around me, keep in contact with people, discuss and do file sharing. Sometimes I also watch some videos that people create or share as entertainment.

I agree that I use Facebook to kill time sometimes and also trying to ‘escape’ my reality, as scrolling Facebook can be a really mindless action. Recently, I was studying about how to make myself more productivity and I came across a very interesting video about how to make ones more productivity. In this video, it mentions that the biggest barrier that people met when starting a work is to begin it, because human mind will start to visualise all those hardship that might happen, and when this happens people will try to escape this by doing mindless action such as scrolling Facebook.

When I think about ‘when’ actually I access Facebook, I feel like I was one of the ‘phubber’. I scroll Facebook when I feel bored or anxious sometimes, or even like I mentioned above when I try to ‘escape’ and did mindless action. If you try to search online about ‘phubber’ you can find that that’s actually a lot of community that is raising awareness about phubbing people are trying to stop ‘phubbing’, one of the famous community is this it even has a website call http://stopphubbing.com.

My nature activity on Facebook might be also yours…

Like most of you out there, I treat Facebook as one of my entertainment source. I watch funny video, ‘like and comment’ friends’ picture, read and share article or news up there.

Back in the old days, when I was in the age of 10-14, I can rarely remember, I use to share a lot of my thoughts and emotions in Facebook by using Facebook’s ‘Post Status Function’ and hope that people will acknowledge me or give me more ‘Likes or Shares’ (Functions provided by Facebook), and spend lots of time checking this trying to a very famous people in the social media. Research shows that these actions could cause mental health which dubbed as ‘boosts in self-affirmation’ , meaning that one takes more care about online ‘attraction’ rather than in the real world, and the other one call ‘negative social comparison’ that theorize that the internet takes people away rather than in real world social engagement.

Does these happen to you all too? Do share your thought with me, about the way you use Facebook and also what do you think about Facebook.

Content I create and where I post.

Now, I don’t really share my status and emotions online. I share news on Facebook and Twitter which are officially released and also contribute to GitHub about some of my development work, also share my experience and studies in my personal blog.

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