Facebook: Social Security And Social Privacy Of Facebook

Social networks are tools that let us communicate with friends and family, share our lives with them, learn about theirs, and sometimes even to establish new relationships. Social networking sites are being broadly used by young and adults all over the world, being the formers, the main target market of the largest Social Network of the world, Facebook. According to recent statistics which can be found in Facebook’s home page, the site has 500 million active users around the globe, who have an average of 130 friends in their contact’s lists. The same statistics also show that it is estimated that the average user spends around 58 minutes per day browsing the site, sharing and receiving information. Facebook has several places where different

Everything ruled by privacy restrains that can be set up by the users, where they have the option to choose what they want to show and who they want to share it with. Although Facebook presents a good alternative to interact with our friends when a real face-to-face interaction is not possible, one of its main issues is the danger that it represents to the privacy of its users. Facebook is constantly reinforcing its security systems and also improving the privacy configurations available; however, these efforts do not eliminate the problem. Probably, because it is not about how safe the system is or what options the users have to limit their profiles, but it is about the amount of information they share, the contacts they have on their lists, and the cleverness of the

During the years we have seen that security systems on Internet have been improving and becoming more complex; however, we also see constant ‘cyber attacks’ to different web sites with the purpose of stealing information. Such attacks demonstrate that hackers are keeping up with the security improvements enhancing their techniques as well. In the article “The Impact of Facebook on Our Students” written by Doug Fodeman director of technology at Brookwood School in Manchester, UK, it can be found that the main reason hackers have to attack social networks, is to steal financial information. The author says “Once phished, scammers use various applications to suck out personal information from a user 's entire network of friends. Scammers try using the phished information, including the login password, to access banks and credit card accounts because they know that most people have one password for all their accounts”(37). Showing that whenever this sort of attack occurs, the user compromises personal information, other accounts and also his friends. Since not all Facebook users are computer Geeks that know when to identify this kind of threats and how to avoid them, and hackers are constantly updating their methods it is hard to find a solution to the problem simply because there is nothing that Facebook can do to solve it