Assessing Security & Privacy of Online Social Media

Abstract

In recent years, use of online social media networking (OSMN) such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. has become part of people’s routine life activities. OSMN provides Internet users to communicate and collaborate with family, friends, social groups, and other communities. In addition, it is a great tool for people to share text, family photos, their life habits, etc. Unfortunately, many users are unaware of the security risks associated with the use of this technology. The risk may include privacy violation, identity theft, malware, fake profiles, exploiting children, etc. Many OSMN users may accidentally or intentionally expose personal and intimate details about themselves, their friends, and their relationships online. As the use of OSMNs becomes progressively more embedded in users’ daily lives, personal information becomes easily exposed and abused. Information harvesting, by both the OSMN operators and by third-party commercial companies, has recently been identified as a significant security concern for the users as well as for the public.

The objective of this research is to investigate and implement ways for mitigating security breaches and privacy violation of OSMN users. Most social media offer their users an option for security settings. However, it is not known whether those setting are effective for keeping user’s personal and shared data private. To evaluate the effectiveness of the privacy settings, we need to know what types of user’s data various OSMN technology keep about their users and where do they save the data. We will use forensics tools and methodology to retrieve user’s data once before the application of security settings and once after the security settings is applied. Based on the outcome of our experiment, recommendation of best practices for mitigating user’s privacy violation and security breaches will be made. Our initial investigation shows that not all the OSMN technology use the same method and location for saving user’s data. Therefore, we focus on three of the most popular technology namely, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Retrieving data from memory will also help forensics investigators to identify criminal or inappropriate activities through online social media networking.