Privacy concerns with social networking services

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and SnapChat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion of the databases ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration and the legality, awareness and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in the advance of the technological age.

Social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. Privacy concerns with social networking services is a subset of data privacy, involving the right of mandating personal privacy concerning storing, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Social network security and privacy issues result from the astronomical amounts of information these sites process each day. Features that invite users to participate in—messages, invitations, photos, open platform applications and other applications are often the venues for others to gain access to a user's private information. In addition, the technologies needed to deal with user's information may intrude their privacy. More specifically, In the case of Facebook. Adrienne Felt, a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley, made small headlines last year when she exposed a potentially devastating hole in the framework of Facebook's third-party application programming interface (API). It made it easier for people to lose their privacy. Felt and her co-researchers found that third-party platform applications on Facebook are provided with far more user information than it is needed. This potential privacy breach is actually built into the systematic framework of Facebook. Unfortunately, the flaws render the system to be almost indefensible. "The question for social networks is resolving the difference between mistakes in implementation and what the design of the application platform is intended to allow", said David Evans, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. Moreover, there is also the question of who should be held responsible for the lack of user privacy? According to Evan, the answer to the question is not likely to be found, because a better regulated API would be required for Facebook "to break a lot of applications, [especially when] a lot of companies are trying to make money off [these] applications". Felt agrees with her conclusion, because "there are marketing businesses built on top of the idea that third parties can get access to data and user information on Facebook".

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