In an increasingly connected world, each user uses one or more social networks both in the personal and professional fields, in this article we are going to describe some problems or risks derived from the use of social networks, which we can find if not the we use appropriately.
Publication of personal data
One of the advantages of social networks is that they help you connect with friends or other people with whom you can share relevant information. However, the publication of personal information without control can threaten the security of the person who publishes it as well as their environment.
Therefore, it is not advisable to share your home address, telephone number or workplace with strangers, especially when doing so without adequate control on social networks if they are going to be visible to millions of users.
To keep the number of people who have access to our information limited, it is important to review the privacy options of those social networks in which we are subscribed to check who can consult our information and to minimize subsequent damage.
Publication of personal data by another person
As mentioned above, it is possible to configure the visibility options of our information on social networks; however, it is easy to lose control of that information if our contacts post the information we upload to social media and then share it with their friends without first checking with us.
This usually happens, for example, when our friends tag us in photos on a social network such as Facebook, leaving our name exposed to people who might not be of our confidence.
Before this, you can tell your contacts not to tag you in photos or activate the option to check tags with your name before being published on Facebook (in the case of this social network).
Loss of time to do other activities
It is very common to see both young people and adults devoting all their attention to mobile terminals, both with friends and family.
In many cases this abstraction from real life may be due to reading the latest news or publications from Facebook contacts or counting the number of “likes” of the last Instagram photo.
The interaction with the different existing social networks is important but also in carrying out other types of activities such as spending quality time with our environment or investing time in activities of our interest outside of the connection to a social network since these in some circumstances can cause health problems related to addiction to them.
Potential exposure to cyberbullying
Many of the existing social networks have been created to share information between friends but there are people who can use them to post harmful information to other people.
This action is known as cyberbullying and luckily more and more social networks have taken measures to prevent this type of situation by adding tools to block and report these conflicts.
Young people who have profiles on social networks do not necessarily have to suffer cyberbullying, but it is important to review important actions with them if they are faced with this problem and immediately inform an adult of this fact.
Impersonation
Phishing occurs when someone else acts on our behalf for malicious purposes. This fact is increasingly common in social networks, where a false profile is created with the name of the victim under which content is shared or there is reputational and image damage to the person impersonated.
Profiles can be created using our personal data or by modifying our profile through the theft of credentials and the use of it without our consent, in order to modify or create content on our behalf.
To avoid this fact, it is important to control the information we publish on the networks, as well as, for example, have strong access passwords that prevent a malicious person from obtaining our credentials.
Be
In the network we can find numerous online applications that connect with our profiles on social networks or that promise to inform us of who visited our profile or see the answers to questions that our friends from a social network have answered, but that in reality may contain malware that it can infect us.
Before installing any application it is important to make sure that it has a good reputation and that you are downloading it from an official and confirmed site.
Another example in which we find malware on social networks is on Twitter, since the use of URL shorteners for links has been used for spam campaigns or malware distribution.
Job refusals / Bad reputation
The human resources departments of companies are increasingly aware of social networks and what their future employees say or do there by making real examinations of their activity.
This fact is not taken into account by many users and can affect the online reputation of the person and cause unexpected consequences in the selection processes when applying for a job.
In addition, this not only occurs at the level of people, it is also very common to see news where a company suffers a bad reputation due to poor management of an online crisis, inadequate management of professional profiles or poor management in the publication of content among others.
Therefore, it is also very important that the person or department to whom we delegate the management of corporate social networks has training and experience in the matter to avoid cases of bad reputation in our brand that can cause irreparable damage to our company..
To conclude, mentioning that nothing is forgotten on the internet and that we must think several times if the information that we see or share on social networks will not cause us problems in the future.
The fundamental advice is that we review the privacy options of all the social networks to which we are subscribed to have identified how and with whom our information is shared as well as the use they make of our information.
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Placida Fernandez
Cybersecurity Department
Áudea Information Security
