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By Wole Akpose
Social networks, social media and
social graphs are relatively new phrases in our
collective lexicon, but
they are becoming increasingly important ones in our
personal and
professional lives. As social
networking sites and apps become more pervasive and
increasingly embedded on the intimate setting of
our mobile phones and other hand-held devices,
the limited restraint formerly exercised on what
we post to such sites seems to have
disappeared altogether. Twitter, for example, with its 140-character
limit seems like a perfect outlet for sharing
instant thoughts about anything, from political to personal thoughts and
everything else in between. But this ease of
sharing our most intimate thoughts and emotions
presents
both opportunities and
dangers.
The goal of this article
is to help make informed and savvy social
network users out of readers, alerting them to
potential threats and highlighting opportunities. In many
ways, this article was developed in response to
the many
conversations I have had about social networking with people
from all
ages, social backgrounds and academic backgrounds;
from those who won't
use social networking sites at all because they
perceive them as being too dangerous, to those
who use them freely, sharing and friending without
reservation.
A Little Background
MySpace became an instant
Internet sensation in the early 2000s, and by
2005, Facebook had become the hottest
application on the Internet. Then along came LinkedIn and YouTube and Orkut and Buzz, and
Ning, and hi5 and so many others. By the end of
the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the social networking revolution was well on its
way, helping to create a new breed of
multi-billionaires in the process and spurring
several new industries and professions along the
way — including apps developers, bloggers,
search engine optimization professionals, social
networking site analysts, social media
optimization professionals, to mention a few.
The value of social networking
to their inventors, investors and site owners
comes from the number
of users who use the sites and the information
they share, willingly or otherwise. In the words of
IBM's Jeff Crume:
“The user is not the customer, the user is the
product.”
Last spring, Facebook announced that
its user base had exceeded the half-billion
mark. By last summer, Facebook had surpassed Google
as the most visited site on the Internet. All
the while, the
social networking site enjoyed steadily
increasing advertising revenue.
But while the money-making
juggernaut marches on, much to the delight of
its users, the criminal world has
also taken note. Facebook has become a leading
resource for data-trolls.
Many users routinely post information on their Facebook page that they wouldn't share with a
stranger on the street — birthdates, phone
numbers, e-mail addresses, instant message
handles, family details, intimate thoughts, mood
status, relationship status, and yes, pictures —
lots of pictures.
One of the students I
interviewed for this piece proudly informed me of her skills at protecting
herself: she doesn't use her real name on Facebook.
The problem is that she does connect to her family members
and shares a lot of pictures, too — pictures in
which she is tagged.
In an earlier article on "Protecting
Your Personal Information on Facebook"
(Today's Engineer, June 2010), I described some
of the dangers and offered some tips for how to
protect yourself on
such sites. Since then, Facebook has introduced
updates to its “privacy” settings, reviewed its
privacy policy and announced that many of its
most popular third-party apps have stolen user
data. The site has also been the victim of several spam and malware attacks.
Despite the problems, Facebook is expected to
hold an initial public offering sometime in
2012. The company's current estimated value is
around $50 billion — more than four times its
value in March 2010 — which would likely be
considered a bargain by the time it does go
public.
Here are five dangers to watch
out for and some tips for protecting yourself
from them...
Viruses and Malware
Increasingly, the Internet is
becoming a behemoth social network — or the
social networking sites are becoming the
Internet. Facebook now boasts more than 500
million users and became the Internet's most
visited site among U.S. users in 2010,
surpassing search powerhouse Google. The
popularity of social networking sites
has not caught the cyber-criminal community
off-guard — such sites have become
a major playing ground for cyber criminals as a
recent Forrester research commissioned by McAfee
pointed out. An increasing number of platform applications
(Apps)
provides easy hiding place for Trojan horses.
Social networking Apps have been discovered to
covertly harvest user information, including
information about “friends” and even data that
was not explicitly shared with the public or
with the given application. While others set up
to redirect unsuspecting users to harmful sites
where viruses and other malware reside. Since the Apps
are some of the key benefits of social networking
sites, the increasing incidents of Apps as
emissaries of malware is an alarming trend
calling for caution. But when it comes to risk
potential, social networking Apps are not alone
— Mobile Apps, especially on
Android with its open development policy, could also harbor malware
or becoming stepping stones to malware infection.
Exercise caution when being referred to
third-party sites and make sure your personal
firewall and software security packages (with
anti-virus, anti-spam and spyware detection
features) are turned on and have been updated
with the latest security patches.
Identity Theft
Over the span of one week in
2010, Facebook revealed
that some of its popular Apps are collecting
user data without notice or authorization, and
MySpace confirmed that it has been sharing user
data with its partners, without user
knowledge or consent. But these types of
transactions aren't even the
biggest threats to users. Your user identity, which
continues to be accessible by criminal networks who
may pose as your friend or as friendly
applications to steal your personally
identifying information (PII), is the most
important information you have on the.
In earlier
stages of Internet development, the threat of identity
theft was limited to thieves' ability to retrieve
your PII by collecting and aggregating data
about you from the Internet. Such
information was limited to information provided
by the content publishers — including counties and
schools or clubs — and rarely were pictures and video
involved. Today, an identity thief can piece
together a relatively complete profile, including
recent photos (can be used to make a fake
photo id — in your name), your family and family
history and background, your entire life history
(can be graphed from the information your
provide on Facebook and other social networking
sites), the sound of your voice (recorded on
some video blog posted on YouTube) and a host of
other data about you, your lifestyle, your
friends and family and everything else. Identity
thieves can access these sorts of things with
relative ease, and access is near impossible to prevent given the core
assumptions of the sites themselves, and most
users' predilection to post them in
the first place.
Cyber Bullying
 The
concept of cyber bullying has moved past academic theory
and into reality. In 2010, cases of cyber
bullying precipitated several high-profile teen
suicides. These tragic incidents highlight
the dangers and reality of a phenomenon that could soon become epidemic of
if ignored. What is cyber bullying? It involves
harassment, picking-on, threatening or causing
harm using the Internet. Because of the cloak of
anonymity under which online bullies often
operate, the medium makes it easy for to harass
both
young people and adults — in schools, at
work places or in any other social and
non-social context.
Social networking or social networking
sites can exacerbate the problem of bullying.
News travels faster and further online
than they used to by word of mouth. And rather
than just a description, a cyber bully can even
use images or video or voice recordings to
further their agenda of aggression, cruel jokes
or even hate. And if you don’t know it, your own
recorded images, words or online video could
come back to haunt you as a victim of cyber
bullying — Once the information is out there,
who knows who has access to it?
Scam or Con
Artists
A search of the phrase “Facebook
scam” returned 17,500,000 results, and one for
“Facebook scams for money” returned 851,000
results. These search results point to one
obvious trend: social networking sites have
become an opportune staging ground for
opportunistic scammers and con-artists — and for
obvious reasons. According to Facebook, an
average user has 130 friends. A close look at 20
random real users shows a much higher average of
318 and a median of 290. And those are just
first degree connections. LinkedIn's network
metric provides a deeper view of higher degrees
of connection with its Number of People in Your
Network metric. For most users, the number
quickly exceeds one million. So if you are
linked to 500 other people but have 1 million
people in your network — then you theoretically
have 950,000 you did not actively “friend,” who
as “friends-of-friends” can know more about you,
and use such information in a con-attempt.
Indirectly, and inadvertently,
you have empowered the con-artists. And a con or scam could come in
legions of ways — from a solicitation for donations
for some crooked objectives to outright schemes
to defraud using intimate information about you
that you have inadvertently provided through or
in your profile, or that others have provided
about you. Social networking can help you create
a web of friends — as well as a web that
facilitates con and scam artists.
A Reputation in Ruins?
Today, "Googling" a person is
commonplace — everyone knows that employers and even dates take
a quick peek at your online identity before
inking a deal. If you don't manage your online
image carefully, you could end up losing a job
interview... or worse. What about your prospective
mother-in-law finding out about your last ten
relationships through your Facebook brags or
pity-parties?Always keep lewd
and crude (sometimes nude) pictures or even video
to yourself. What may be good for a laugh now could
spell disaster down the road.
I conducted interviews with more
than thirty students in my research for this
article. Only one doesn't have a Facebook
account. While an increasing number are
beginning to pay attention to privacy issues
like not having their real date of birth on
their profile, or scrumming their friends list
off people they do not know somehow (did not
attend the same school or do not seem familiar),
most still take information on their profile for
granted. Not one ever deleted any of those
impulsive “mood status” or “wall postings,” and
none ever bother to revisit those pictures from
8th grade or sophomore year, that
could be considered embarrassing now. The danger
is there, but it is hardly apparent to the
average user. Those benign thoughts you
shared on your page, the goofy pictures or that
cute video from years past, could become your
Achilles heel in your quest for promotion or
a graduate school application.
Obviously, social networking
isn't all bad — there wouldn't be more than 700 million
active social networking accounts if that were
the case. A social networking site's primary utility to
users is its ability to expand their social
interactions. Even if we're beginning to suspect
that their greatest value in social networking
is to the site owners and
operators (many billionaires have been minted
since 2005), smart and savvy users can turn
these tools into a gold-mine.
Following are some useful things you may not know
about social networking sites...
Increasing Your Network of Contacts
As recently as the summer of 2010,
many people I know still viewed LinkedIn as a
social network for professionals or a "site for
professional social networking," and Facebook
(also MySpace) as site for casual interactions.
Many have created profiles to reflect those
assumptions, posting “professional stuff” on
LinkedIn, while being a little more “free” on
Facebook. But the reality is that the Internet
does not support such assumptions. Both Facebook and LinkedIn (as
well as most other social networking Sites) can be leveraged to increase
your network of contacts — both for casual and professional purposes. You could build a
network of “friends” or a “professional rolodex”
from both types of sites, and you could
cultivate these contacts as you would contacts
you have met in real-life. Of course, many
people will only accept links to connect or
friend request from names they are familiar
with, it is still possible to create good will
beyond your immediate circle of friends.
Information you share on Facebook and LinkedIn
could reach millions of other users, directly or
indirectly. A LinkedIn question, for example,
will reach everyone in your network. If you have
more than 400 LinkedIn connections, that could be more
than a million people. Sharing a link or a
recommendation on Facebook with friends of
friends could have the same impact. Of course,
sharing with everyone on Facebook means you
could potentially reach more than 500 million
users.
Best Companies to Work For
If you're in the job market and
looking for that next great opportunity, rather
than relying on Google and an organization's
website, you can
easily learn a lot about organizations through
social network chat sessions and
through social networking links. Many
organizations today have a social network
presence or pages listing
some of their employees' social network URLs.
You can quickly scan those
people’s walls for more information, or you
might even find someone to ask directly.
With social networking you no
longer need to make a physical visit or even make a
phone call to get some real scoop about an
interesting organization, school, event, cause,
etc. People
talk, and they tend to talk a lot on social
networking sites like Facebook.
A Network for Professional Contacts
In business and political
circles, the size of your rolodex is often a
measure of your influence. A large rolodex of
contacts, particularly influential contacts,
could be the difference between an important
deal and failure, or could make or break a
political fund raising venture. This is no less
true with the cyber contacts in your
social network. LinkedIn and IEEE Member Net are
two of a growing cadre of social networking
sites for professionals, and they provide a set
of tools for assuring the reliability of those
contacts. IEEE Member Net is a social networking
tool open only to IEEE members — thereby
providing some assurance as to who is in the
network. It is a network of more than 300,000
professionals and 80,000 students across six
continents. Any IEEE member can access any other
IEEE member who has opted to share his or her
information through the site.
LinkedIn provides
various tools including “recommendations,”
listing of awards, certifications and posting of
works — the network has become a great, dynamic
resume builder for smart job seekers and
consultants alike. LinkedIn’s job-site
bona fides are obvious from the significant number
of job postings appearing on the site every day.
Many users have found jobs or other
career-related opportunities through their LinkedIn contacts. Another important utility is
the ability to request an “introduction” to
someone else within you network who is not
directly connected to you. Given the Six
Degrees of Connection theory, it's possible to
find a willing facilitator to almost anyone
within the global LinkedIn network.
Recruiting Friends for Your Cause or Economic
Interest
In 2008, Barack Obama used the
Internet — especially social networking — to
reach a very broad spectrum of the society —
particularly the now famous Obama voters. Obama
won the lion's share of young voters, many of
whom also campaigned energetically for the
nation's first African-American president.
Increasingly, political parties,
not-for-profit and even for-profit
organizations and causes have found a receptive
audience on social networking sites. Facebook
and Twitter continue to improve tools for such
use. The Facebook page is a tool you can use to
promote your business or cause with or without
paid advertisement. While user accounts are
limited to a maximum of 5,000 friends, pages
can have millions who “like” them — and they are
still under the control of users. Of course,
pages can have multiple administrators, and thus
can be controlled by various users, increasing
the utility and ease of use. Twitter even
provides a verification tool to improve
confidence in the identities of celebrity users,
as well as those of the
people trying to market or advertise their causes
or politics. Smart businesses are taking
advantage of the growing market opportunities on
these sites — oftentimes free — and so should
smart individuals.
Build a Great Reputation
The risk of
damaging your reputation online has a flip-side —
you can also create a great reputation online.
And many savvy users do that all the time. Just
take a close look at many LinkedIn profiles, or
consider Youtube videos you have seen describing a
process or explaining a topic. Often the users
behind those works are actively promoting
themselves, and positioning themselves for that
next great opportunity. Your Facebook page, your
LinkedIn profile, your YouTube videos, your
Flickr images or even your tweets can all be
orchestrated in an intentional way to tell the story you want people to hear, read or see of you. The
popular saying that “it's tougher to build than
to destroy” is also true online. Destroying your
reputation takes very little thought or effort —
but building a great one requires lots of
painstaking, hard work. However, the potentially
high payback is worth it in the long run.
Your LinkedIn recommendations
can help you land that next job. Your
well-crafted do-it-yourself YouTube video may
lead an employer or a potential customer your
way, just as your Facebook blog or article could
inform someone else of your subject matter
expertise in a particular field. Deciding what to post, what
recommendations to solicit and show on your
profile, which picture to post on your profile
or what video to post online should be a
calculated decision aimed at bolstering your
opportunities... or they could end up being careless
decisions that could come back to haunt you
later.
Some References
http://www.focus.com/fyi/it-security/security-risks-social-networks/
http://blogs.csoonline.com/social_networking_security_risks
http://www.darkreading.com/blog/archives/2010/01/are_facebook_vi.html
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Security-Researchers-Outline-Security-Risks-of-Social-Networking-Sites-at-Black-Hat/
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=71826
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1760
http://www.yoursphereforparents.com/2010/10/10-things-parents-can-do-to-combat-cyberbullying.html
http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/16/technology/facebook_most_visited/
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com
http://www.alexa.com/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37398110/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebooks-us-traffic-reaches-132-million-visitors-2010-01
http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/13/social-network-security-technology-cio-network-social-network.html
http://www.pandasecurity.com/usa/homeusers/media/press-releases/
http://mashable.com/2010/02/01/social-networks-security-risk/
http://www.todaysengineer.org/2010/Jun/facebook.asp
Opinions expressed in this
article are the author's and do not necessarily
reflect those of IEEE or IEEE-USA.
Dr. Wole Akpose is the
Membership Development Chair for Region 2 and a
member of the IEEE ITC&O and the Individual
Benefit and Services Committee. He is the
founder of HNT Solutions, a technology
consulting company and a technology manager
and occasional faculty member at Morgan State
University.
Comments may be submitted to
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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