Thank you, Dariusz, for posting a most relevant question. My area of research is users' behaviors in information security.

You are indeed right that privacy is connected to information security, and online social networks (OSNs) has a huge amount of personal information shared by person himself or one of his connections. There is also a debate on the differences of OSN, social media websites, social media portals and similar others. There are similarities in them but different researchers used these terms without any standardization.

Moving away from the debate of "user of correct term", I believe users have share already a lot on the OSNs and I am compelled to say that at individual level we have lost the battle of privacy against the giants such as Facebook and Google. They know and remember much more than we do. However, what is left behind is to preserve privacy of an individual from being violated by "Script kiddies" and a tech savvy guy(s). We need to raise awareness among the users based on this point.

The other point you have mentioned was about use of users' data for marketing purpose. Well, that was purpose of OSNs, otherwise, how will they gather revenue for their businesses. What we, as researchers, should look into how to improve and make their terms and conditions users' friendly so that users' may read them before accepting them. I must say only the most informed users will read the terms as their needs to use an OSN is much more higher than their perceived importance of privacy :)

I would love to discuss more, and even work if you have something in mind to initiate.

Cheers,

Ali

Choose the sources of information properly bring you information security

Users of social media platforms play a key role in the privacy of their information. While claiming they have concerns about their privacy, users keep disclosing more and more sensitive information - A paradox

That issues is Very Important. remember Like I-cloud hacked by Anonymous and many artist photos have been shared in wiki-leak.

I think one of the main weakest links is the exploitation of the "Data Privacy Policy" or "Terms & Conditions" statements. Just like mainstream software where you have to "agree" that you have read and accepted the "Data Privacy Policy" statement (otherwise the software won't install), social media too exploits this approach. If they don't agree with the "Data Privacy Policy" or "Terms & Conditions" statements, then they can't register. The average user just wants to get registered and get started using the platform without fully understanding what they have agreed to. And to add salt to the wound, we as users are in the dark as to how far our private data is being used by social media platforms. Most assuredly we know that it's being used in advertisements even as you see annoying ads matching your user profile or similar to your browsing patterns. This is besides being exposed to forced ads that won't let you go past anything (usually on videos) before they finishing running. And yet still, we have seen reports that detail how personal user data from social media platforms has been misused to sway public opinions and to some extent affect outcomes of major political events. This is why robust AND realistic data privacy models are so important. Otherwise, it's really a tough call.

Although this is not directly connected to social media, I invite you to trajectory a look at a survey I did some time back named "Android Users Privacy Awareness Survey". You'll see shocking results of how people treat the "terms and conditions" and "permissions" the apps have.

Thank you, Dariusz, for posting a most relevant question. My area of research is users' behaviors in information security.

You are indeed right that privacy is connected to information security, and online social networks (OSNs) has a huge amount of personal information shared by person himself or one of his connections. There is also a debate on the differences of OSN, social media websites, social media portals and similar others. There are similarities in them but different researchers used these terms without any standardization.

Moving away from the debate of "user of correct term", I believe users have share already a lot on the OSNs and I am compelled to say that at individual level we have lost the battle of privacy against the giants such as Facebook and Google. They know and remember much more than we do. However, what is left behind is to preserve privacy of an individual from being violated by "Script kiddies" and a tech savvy guy(s). We need to raise awareness among the users based on this point.

The other point you have mentioned was about use of users' data for marketing purpose. Well, that was purpose of OSNs, otherwise, how will they gather revenue for their businesses. What we, as researchers, should look into how to improve and make their terms and conditions users' friendly so that users' may read them before accepting them. I must say only the most informed users will read the terms as their needs to use an OSN is much more higher than their perceived importance of privacy :)

I would love to discuss more, and even work if you have something in mind to initiate.

Cheers,

Ali

Data privacy and integrity is dependent on the users especially social media where people post sensitive information.

Dear Ali Farooq,

You have raised one critical point which is Awareness. At this point, what we really need is to look at how to increase Users Awareness on how to preserve their privacy being violated. However, I quite disagree that we already lost the battle against those giants of the market - Solutions can be found by designing frameworks oriented security and privacy practices and policies and getting them implement them.

I agree with you on the second point also. Additionally, embedding more security control during the data analytics process for marketing purpose might help protect the users efficiently.

Regards

Are you providing certain information on your profiles established on social media portals, such as Facebook, Tweeter, WhatsAp, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, etc.

Are the personal profiles and social media contained on these portals fully protected, are they fully secure?

Please reply

The problems of the analysis of information contained on social media portals for marketing purposes are described in the publication:

Article THE QUESTION OF THE SECURITY OF FACILITATING, COLLECTING AND...

I invite you to discussion and cooperation.

Greetings

Dear Mahamdou Kante,

I respect your point of view :)

My view that we have already lost battle of privacy to the big giants comes from the fact that these giants (FB and Google) have a huge population of world as their users (2 billion plus) and they know more than what we actually know about us. And 2 billion is quite a big dataset to pridict rest of the population. Whatever frameworks, policies or measures we will take cannot revert what has been done in the past.

Anyways, this is question of perception and thinking and I can be wrong.

Now coming to Dariusz's 2nd question, providing certain information to social media. Well this is an open question and cannot be replied in simply saying I share this this and this on social media. Most of personally identifiable information (PII) are collected by the social medias. EU has a very broad definition of PIIs by the way.

Are profile secures? the counter question is from whom? We need to define the scope here :)

Social Media security is a dire need for research, using different methods for protecting our personal sensitive information i.e. designing a robust authentication scheme using digital signature, ECC, RSA, Symmetric & Asymmetric Cryptography.

When the attacker attempts for accessing our personal sensitive information, the robust scheme either can deny such attempts or provide a safeguard to it. Almost no researcher claims with conviction about a foolproof secure authentication protocol. Therefore, the following points should be kept in mind for working in securing personal sensitive information over social media:

A)The computation and communication cost must balance.

B)Ability to resists all known attacks like impersonation, masquerading, insider, server spoofing, DDoS, Reply etc attacks.

C)Strong user-anonymity be insured.

D)Authentication be done in maximum two to three round trip.

E)A delicate balance between performance and security also be insured; because if security of a protocol is strengthened then it inversely impacts the performance and vice versa.

Dear Ali Farooq , you are probably right but I think we must keep trying at least. For instance the General Data Protection Law (GDPR) by the EU last May was meant to tackle some of the issues but unfortunately it is still limited considering that law enforcement is only one aspect of the puzzle.

There are some good research going on in terms of PII but again real contributions have been realized in the context of personal health information (PHI). I strongly believe that an equivalent of the HIPAA standard in the social network services might be a good start, don't you think ?

Thank you for pinning out this important issue here ;) and sorry for the late reply

Dear Friends and Colleagues of RG

Unfortunately, despite the assurances of companies that run social media portals, the information contained on these websites is not always fully secured against the activities of cybercriminals.

In addition, the issue of downloading data from social media portals by large companies to Big Data database systems should be added in order to process them for marketing purposes.

The issue of privacy in social media is very important and is related to the security of personal information. Privacy is at risk in terms of information posted on social media portals.

Do you agree with me on the above matter?

Please reply

I invite you to the discussion

Best wishes

Dear Friends and Colleagues of RG

The problems of the analysis of information contained on social media portals for marketing purposes are described in the publication:

Article THE QUESTION OF THE SECURITY OF FACILITATING, COLLECTING AND...

I invite you to discussion and cooperation.

Best wishes

What are the most secure measures to protect data and send information in technology communication?

The above discussion inspired me to the following considerations:

How should risk management and information security systems be improved on social media portals?

In my opinion, sensitive personal data concerning individual users who set up profiles, collected on social media portals, are not fully secure. This is confirmed by the occurrence of data leaks, data theft by cybercriminals. In connection with the above, the issue of information security on the Internet is becoming an increasingly global problem and therefore, in the global approach, institutions and security systems for the transfer of information on the Internet should be developed. The security of information on the Internet can refer to many aspects of data security both at the level of central state institutions and international organizations as well as the security of personal data of individual citizens, sensitive data of citizens collected on various websites, including social media portals. The improvement of risk management and information security systems at the supranational level is also a key issue. Technological companies managing social media portals on the one hand try to improve data security systems about users setting up accounts on social media portals. On the other hand, it is also important to cooperate with key, central data security institutions on the Internet that operate transnational. This is important from the point of view of improving information security systems on the Internet in order to limit the possibility of using social media portals by cybercriminals operating transnational, using various social engineering techniques.

Do you agree with me on the above matter?

In the context of the above issues, the following question is valid: How should risk management and information security systems be improved on social media portals?

Please reply

I invite you to the discussion

Thank you very much

Best wishes