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Have you ever wonder there are so many people signing up to Bebo, Facebook, Flickr, Friends Reunited, LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and YouTube, BUT.. Since then, privacy issues have incurred from all these social networking sites. It cant be denied that there are many security issues surrounding websites in general and specifically social networking sites – For this time, I have only highlighted the issues that I found relating to privacy and data security.
(image obtained from http://www.boston.com)
Many social networking sites are commercial enterprises owned by large, multinational organisations such as Yahoo! or Google. Many people believe ‘Tom’ to have started MySpace, but it was actually created by a company called eUniverse.
Google famously bought YouTube in October year 2006, paying a staggering US Dollar $1.65bn – but why? Have you ever wonder? And YEAh! It’s all about data and it seems like Google have tonnes of it on its users, but Google never deletes data collected on its users and some day in the future, the day may come when it could make billions and billions from flogging it.
Sites such as Facebook and MySpace say that they find it reasonable to collect and store personal information about users such as occupation, gender and personal interests in order to ‘maximise your enjoyment’ of their sites. Facebook quite eerily states that it may also search for information about you on blogs, newspapers and instant messaging services. Why on earth should they feel that this is appropriate? So that you can enjoy a more personalised service, apparently. Personally, I think that’s a bit much and would not in any way agree to this – but millions of people have done, by signing up to use Facebook, as this privacy encroachment forms part of the privacy policy that all users have to agree to having read and abide by when signing up.
Accepting Google’s privacy policy forms part of signing up to use YouTube and it’s another one that’s keen to improve your user experience – ‘We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience’.
Yahoo! is another big corporate with social networking interests in the form of Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website. Its privacy terms state that ‘Once you register with Yahoo! and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us.’ It also plays the ‘user experience’ card and goes on to say that it uses personal data for three purposes – content customisation, ‘to fulfill your requests for certain products and services’ (whatever that may mean) and to flog you stuff.
Yahoo! is another big corporate with social networking interests in the form of Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website. Its privacy terms state that ‘Once you register with Yahoo! and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us.’ It also plays the ‘user experience’ card and goes on to say that it uses personal data for three purposes – content customisation, ‘to fulfill your requests for certain products and services’ (whatever that may mean) and to flog you stuff.
So people out there, BEWARE!! As you are signing up for any Social Networking Sites, Please bear in mind to read the policy or terms and conditions. You don't wanna see your pictures to be in some advertisement someday out there without you knowing it! @.@
Signing Off,
Justin
Source of reference: Social Networking by Sarah Tuner, [Online], Retrieved on 12th February 2010. URL: http://www.blogsecurity.net/
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