The Threats of Social Media to Privacy

    Social media has been a part of the daily lives of the people in the world. One of the reason why people keep using social media is to keep in touch with family and friends, there are also career opportunities available in social media for instance, online influencers, digital marketing and content manager. There are so many benefits to reap from social media and it also comes with it sets of cons, there are many threats to the user surrounding how social media handles its user's privacy and information.

 

Exposure of personal data

Companies keep the set of data that a user provide to their platform, this data contains personal and sensitive data such as the user's real name, birthdate and home address, it can also contain posts that the user have made. This set of data can help the company create a personal profile of the user's behavior and interaction on their platform and can used to create better targeted advertisements to their users.

Identity theft

There is a possibility that someone can impersonate a user and steal their identity for personal or malicious reasons. Impersonator can trick other people to provide them information and this can lead to a data breach.

Infectious malware

The benefit of being able to interact with anyone can be its biggest threat. A user that has been infected by a malicious software can spread its malware to anyone like in a situation where an infected email is clicked and will be automatically sent to everyone they have on their friend list and this occurrence can happen over and over again.

The Dangers of Free WIFI

     Whenever we are at public spaces, we sometimes encounter these establishments that offer free WIFI connection to its customers. Connecting to these public WIFI can make users be at risk to hackers. It is indeed convenient to access these WIFI to freely browse the net but this freedom comes with a price. It is important to be aware and understand the risks of connecting to public WIFI. it should help us learn how to protect ourselves and our precious personal data.

 

    Most public WIFI in a establishment such as a coffee shop are secured with a password and it only requires an interaction to a staff by asking the WIFI password to access them. Some are free and often makes the user browse through a catalog of advertisement for a minute to access them. We all have important and sensitive information on our devices and unfortunately the majority of public WIFI users do not realize the possible threats they have.

    The majority of threats are concerned with connecting to a public WIFI that has been tampered by a hacker. Connecting to a WIFI compromised by a hacker can lead to information theft, hackers can have access to the login credentials of social media accounts or event bank accounts. Hackers can also distribute malware and other viruses that can infect our devices.

    Here are some of the solution that users can take to protect themselves when connecting to a public WIFI:

• Use a VPN service to encrypt any data that you send or receive over a WIFI network. 
• Keep your activity minimum, do not login to any social media accounts or bank accounts and disconnect from the public WIFI immediately once you are done.
• Use a cellular data instead of a public WIFI if you need to connect to the internet.
• Keep you WIFI off when not accessing the internet, to avoid automatically connecting to a random WIFI connection.

    It is dangerous to connect to a public WIFI because it exposes us to a lot of threats put up by hackers. Most of the solutions is to either browse the net moderately, use a service that can protect us or to completely avoid connecting to a public WIFI connection.

Data Privacy Principles

    There are these data privacy principle I have learned and how I understood them, it is important to master these principles to acknowledge the rights of the data subjects and ensure the confidentiality, secrecy and security of their data.

Data Privacy Principles

1. Transparency - The data subject must be informed of what their data will be used for and how it will be processed, It is important that any information about how it is handled is clear and easy to understand the data subject must give their consent for their data to be handled. 

2. Legitimate purpose - The purpose of the usage and processing of data must not be illegal and unethical. 

3. Proportionality - The usage and processing of data must be aligned with the declared purpose and must not be used for other purposes.

What makes a personal information a sensitive personal information?

    From what I have learned, sensitive personal information are information that must not be disclosed to the public, in contrast to personal information which can be publicly disclosed, this is how I distinguish both these information. My professor further elaborated that the sensitive information can be a personal preference, information that must not be disclosed publicly to avoid unwanted consequences, for instance, people not wanting to disclose their gender preference to avoid discrimination harm to their well-being.

Are you for sale? Am I for sale?

    As a student, in order to enroll myself into a school, I am required to fill up forms entailing information about myself and I did exactly that, I have always nonchalantly shared my information thinking that I have no choice but to offer it in order to access something, just like offering my information to the school in order to enroll myself. Now that I think about it, I was basically disclosing my personal and sensitive information, I was thinking whether I was giving away my information for free but I think that I did not gave it away for free, I gave my information in order for me to be able to enroll to a school.

    In a discussion about data privacy, we were asked what is the most important thing we have in our possession, the subject is about data privacy therefore the obvious answer is data or information about ourselves, but why is it important to us in the first place, I have learned that personal and sensitive information can be used against us and others can make money out of it, it was pointed out that if we get robbed of our money, we just lose money but I think that is an understatement since losing money is still unfortunate but if we get robbed of our sensitive information such as our pin number of credit cards or password to applications that gives financial services such as Paymaya, Gcash, PayPal, etc., we both lose our information and money which is more unfortunate, if someone got a hold of our personal information, we can fall victim to identity theft, and I think these instances highlights the significance of data.

    Losing personal and sensitive data can have devastating consequences, but it will not be lost easily if given to a trusted organization. I learned that when sharing my personal and sensitive information, I must make sure that the one I am sharing it to safeguards that information I have given them. The data must be stored in a secured database and the information must not be shared without consent, I will have to rely on the organization's data regulations and legislations such as the republic act 10173 for my information to be protected.

    Even with our data protected by a trusted organization, people can still attempt to steal or tamper our data and if this happens, the organization will be at fault, therefore it is the organization's responsibility to compensate for their mistake, but our data will still be lost, the only thing we can do is to do what we can, we can change our passwords if it has something to do with accounts being stolen or just hope that the consequences will be harmless.

    As for the question "Are you for sale?", since we are in the context of data privacy, It made me think about my data, I give my data away in exchange for school enrollment, a web service application like Gmail and Facebook, and other things, so does that mean I sold my data for a service or something? It sounds like bartering for me but I am not sure, as far as I know, I have not sold my data for money and if other people are going to sell my data for money, I would rather do it myself than let them because I need money. If there is one thing I need to keep in my mind is that I must make sure that the organization that keeps my data follows proper data privacy protocol and data privacy laws for protection and to avoid my data being illegally shared and sold somewhere.

What is this blog?

This blog will contain all my thoughts, insights, learnings and realizations regarding Data Privacy and Security