Vito Cassisi – Tech Blog Delving into technology

Social Security

Facebook knows your secrets. Tell? (Y/N): _

The Internet is an insanely massive collection of servers and nodes, all of which serve a part of our rich online experience. At first it was a purely educational technology on a very slow connection; capable of text-only transmission. Since its mainstream acceptance in the 90s, there's been a massive drive to create a intuitive user experience. People have moved on from creating animated GIF filled pages about their favourite pets, and the horrible ad supported 'free' hosting services which allowed anyone to actively contribute to the worlds ASCII art collection. Not to mention the abundance of 'under construction' declarations - there's irony in that, I'm sure of it.

What was eventually formed is a generation of new sites which offer clean and dynamic infrastructures to create, share and discuss almost anything. Think content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, media sharing services including YouTube and Photobucket, and perhaps most importantly, social networking sites. Facebook is one of these social networking sites, and quite possibly the most popular, with an estimated value of 10 billion US dollars and 100 million users worldwide. With a major rise in social networking, should we be concerned with security? Who has access to the information we're submitting to Facebook? Is this information secure?

Nothing on the Internet is private. It's a rule that several users tend to forget on a regular basis. Once information has been placed on a host accessable to the public, it's going to be very hard to remove every copy, particularly when it comes to controversial content. Social networking is no different. In some respects, it's worse. Users are easily lured into a false sense of security, and are often led to provide personal details to 3rd parties without realising.

First and foremost, there's the wealthy list of Facebook security options to run through. I think it's safe to say that many people outright ignore these settings, and it can get hard to keep up when they're constantly being amended - and in some cases - reset. It's arguable that that example was pure user ignorance, sure. However, it's unacceptable for security settings to be altered via an impromptu security notification, especially when it's to such a vulnerable state. Many people were caught out by this, and there's no reason why this couldn't happen again. It's critical that you keep your eyes peeled for tricks such as these.

Take the time to look at the security preferences that Facebook provides. It's as simple as navigating to 'Account' > 'Privacy Settings'. If you're like me, you'd lock everything down as tightly as possible. As constricted as that sounds, it's far from fool proof.

The problem with security and Facebook (apart from being on the Internet) is the fact that all your information is freely available to friends. Makes sense right? Afterall, that's the point of Facebook; to share information with people of your choosing. Unfortunately, this is also the single greatest flaw. Your friends can distribute your details any way they like. Assuming your friends are nice trustworthy people, there's several ways for your information to leak via their access. The most obvious is their account getting compromised, which can be caused by leaving a logged in PC unattended, or through successful phishing attempts. Perhaps a little more tricky is the use of 3rd party Facebook apps.

When a friend allows a quiz, game or other application to access information on their account, they may be inadvertently giving the developer access to your data. Although you can restrict how much information friends can share about you, there's no reason why your wall posts and comments cannot be read, in addition to "name, Profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list and pages".

Facebook, among other companies, need income to remain afloat. The free service is funded by ad revenue and virtual gifts, in addition to 3rd party investments. There's no reason why Facebook couldn't start selling information to advertisers in order to create targeted ads. Will this happen, is it already happening? Possibaly. The solution is simple. Don't put anything on the Internet that you don't want the world seeing. Think deleting your nasty photos will solve the issue? Not quite. You never know where your data will end up.