Leakage Of Personal Information Through Facebook: Factors, Solutions, And Essay.

Leakage of personal information through Facebook.

What are the reasons of this problem

We know that most of the people leak their information through adds which are provided by Facebook by collecting our interest and other information. people log in on that pages (adds) which hack our data.

We can not say that Facebook should be banned because it is a method of earn money by social sites but to solve this we should find the best solution for example,which information should provide on the internet.

Factors Contributing to Leakage of Personal Information on Facebook

In the last two decades, online social networks have moved from niche phenomenon to a huge adoption. Facebook has transformed from a local college network to the most popular social networking sites among the people of all age groups. The current research also shows the sufficient evidence that Facebook is expanding as a ubiquitous giant information leakage repository which collects the personal data of its users from various objects like groups, events, interaction on community pages etc.

As per the information available on public sites, more than 30 billion pieces of content like news, links, stories, notes, blog posts, and photo albums are shares by the Facebook users in a month. The high volume of information sharing activities generates a number of privacy risks for the users. The risks may involve unwanted stalking, duplication of user id, the disclosure of accidental information, damage to reputation and many more (Molok, Chang, & Ahmad, 2010).

This report describes the main factors that affect and increase the leakage of personal information on Facebook. Such factors can be analyzed from the point of view of users as well as the organization. Further, possible solutions that can prevent the breach of information are provided separately for the users and company. In the end, a conclusion has been drawn to summarize the main findings of the report and provide an overview of the concept.

In present scenario, leakage and breach of personal information from Facebook is the major problem, which is required to be considered by the users as well as by the organization. The main reasons behind this problem can be described as below:

Attitude towards using Facebook

The positive attitudes of the users are based on the simplicity, usefulness, informative quality and compatibility of the Facebook. It helps the individuals to maintain the relations with friends and family members and share the information in form of pictures, text messages, and videos. Facebook has become an important platform for the individuals to show their talent in form of individual and community pages. Irrespective of these uses, it has the main downside in terms of security. As these all uses of demands to upload the personal information of users. For example, to find out the friends, the users have to select the option of synchronizing the phone contacts. In this process, all the related information of contacts automatically uploaded on the Facebook server which can be used easily by the hackers. Similarly, at the time of sharing any picture with the friends, such picture can be downloaded by anyone and can be used for creating the fake profile or for doing any illegal activity (Krombholz, Merkl, & Weippl, 2012).

The organization and companies create their profile to advertise their products and services on the social media platform. Such profile is liked and shared by almost all the employees working in the same organizations. Thus, it becomes easy for the cybercriminals to get the data about the employees and use them in criminal activity against the organization.

Positive Attitudes of Users

Another factor, which forces the superiors and peers to use and share their personal information over Facebook is the influence from society and the people around them. Facebook is considered as the status of the knowledge and being updated of a person. An individual not having a Facebook profile is considered old-fashioned. Thus, such individuals are also influenced to use this social platform even they do not have much interest and knowledge.  (Privacy, Social Network Sites, and Social Relations, 2010).

Cyber industrial espionage, Aurora attacks, and net reconnaissance are some identical terms that can be used to define advanced persistent threats (APT). APT is a well-organized and well-funded espionage that employs social engineering techniques used to hack the information and breach the rarely detected networks. APT attackers target the government, defence a major financial sector organizations. Adobe, Google and other large organizations of US have to face the cyber attacks from China in from of APT attacks. In such attacks email accounts, intellectual property, financial records, and other information were siphoned to the IP addresses of Taiwan. For APT hackers, it is very easy to obtain the personal information of a Facebook user (Advanced Persistent Threat Awareness, 2013).

Facebook is widely used social networking tool by the young age group in comparison to the old age group. Only 14% of the total Facebook users tend to read the privacy policy which is related to the old age group. Thus, the users do not have accurate information related to the management of their personal information on Facebook. This is the most important factor which increases the leakage of information by enabling the hackers to get the information in an easy manner (Asif & Khan, 2012).

There are a number of paid promotions and ads on the Facebook which attract the users to follow their link and log in their account. When users login such accounts with their Facebook profile, all the information and data available on Facebook are transferred to another account. Thus, the users are the main responsible for sharing their personal information on Facebook and other related networking websites (Caers, et al., 2013).

Facebook uses OAuth 2.0 protocol under which, if a user wants to link any application to his/her Facebook profile, then, the application is required to access some basic information including email address, mobile number authentication and linked detailed with Facebook. If the user does not share the same, then he would not be able to link and use the application. Thus, the users are bound to share their personal information, which can even result to leakage of information, by the application developer and related hackers (Ghazinour, Matwin, & Sokolova, 2013).

The problem of leakage of personal information is a very critical issue which may lead to the mental as well as financial loss to the users. Although there is no accurate safety measure that can control such issue wholly as there are a number of high-level hacking techniques and processes which can breach even the most powerful security measures. However, there are some safety measures for the users as well as for the company that can help in securing the personal data of users.

Organization and Companies' Profiles

Strong password

It is hard to guess the stronger password which is directly related to hacking. Hacking is the process of stealing data and information about a person without his/her permission. A Facebook user should never use the common passwords like date of birth, name of relatives and friends, mobile number etc (Capua, 2012).

The users innocently post their regular life events that can often give the hint to the extra security questions. For example, if someone post, ‘happy birthday to my best friend’ and then tag his/her best friend in that post now. Then first personal information that can be leaked about the user is the name of his/her best friend. Further, a security question of Facebook is, ‘What is the name of your best friend?', which can be easily noticed by the social media hackers (5 Threats To Your Security When Using Social Media, 2013).

The users should read the privacy policy at the time of creating their Facebook profile. Although it is time consuming but contains all the information related to the use of information on Facebook and to keep the account secure from unethical practices and hacking. Thus, in order to get the privacy-related information, it is the first duty of the users to read the privacy policy before signing up for Facebook (Esteve, 2017).

Cambridge Analytica has acquired the details of Facebook users with the help of connected applications. The users are required to manage the applications linked to their Facebook profile like Instagram, messenger, youtube, twitter, online banking apps and many more. For this purpose, users can Go to settings>select apps, edit and review all the linked apps.

The present business model of Facebook is running ads. Thus there is no practical way to turn off the same completely. But, users can adjust their preferences to the type of ads they want to get or the type of advertisers might be able to get them.

After making the changes, users would not get the messages, links, and emails from the unwanted advertisers (Garcia, 2017).

The users should not log in to their Facebook account from the public domain. The chances of hacking increase in this situation, as it is easy to store the information in a public domain. Thus, users should try to operate their account in the existence of the private network.

There are always huge possibilities of errors if a person shares any photo or post on Facebook. Even if the privacy is restricted to ‘private’ or ‘friend only’, there is no guarantee that no other person would be able to see it ever. Thus, it is best to share the sensitive and important information by means of personal or direct communication. In addition to this, the users should never update their bank account related information like debit or credit card number on Facebook.

Further, the users should prefer to use a separate email account and cell number for the personal transactions to remain safe in case of breach and leakage of any information (Kaspersky, 2013).

Reframe the privacy policy

Influence from Society

Firstly, Facebook is required to address its privacy policy at present. The devastating information contained in the privacy policy needs to be summarized and presented in a user-friendly and more readable document. However, the users would still cease from reading the same, it is required by Facebook to clearly communicate the privacy practices in order to appear honest and reliable.

The sensitive information of users must be protected on the highest priority irrespective of the location of its storage of sent or used. For this purpose, the organization can also provide the feature of personal chat with the feature to automatically removal of data after sometimes as in the case of Snapchat and Whatsapp status feature (Venkatadri, et al., 2017).

The option of accessing media files and contacts should be removed by the company and there should not be any function which requires to share the same. It may prevent the leakage of information up to some extent.

The company should shut down the avenues from its warehouses, which will help, in preventing incursions by the hacker. Production, security, and management solution are required to be combined to prevent the possible attacks (Rajkumar, 2018).

Facebook should limit the accessibility of the app developers and advertisers to access the personal information of users without their confirmation. It should also restrict the advertisers to make the use of available information in an unethical manner.

The company is required to monitor the type of activities on Facebook and should audit the apps or advertise or any user performing any kind of suspicious activity on it. It would help the company to access the threats existed and to deal with such threat in advance.

If the personal data of any user is hacked and misused, then the organization is required to inform such user immediately to stop the activities that can create more danger to him/her. However, this act would result in disappointing the users but it can also save them from any kind of major problem (Wang, Xu, & Grossklags, 2011).

Conclusion

On the basis of the above analysis, it can be concluded that leakage of personal information of Facebook users depends upon the users as well as the organizations in an equal manner. Both are responsible in different manners. The main reasons are listed above summarizing the type of leakage of data. Further, solutions are mentioned that can provide an overview to the readers that how can users and company control the breach and leakage of data and save it from cybercrime and unethical attacks. All the information is derived from the authentic websites and journal articles published in this regard. The paper reflects on the concept of leakage of personal information over Facebook in an easy and precise manner.

References

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