Defining social media

We all know what “social media” is. Or do we? The list of potential websites and services is probably more extensive than you think:

• Blogging services include Blogger (blogger.com), Contentful (contentful.com), Jekyll (jekyllrb.com), Medium (medium.com), and WordPress (creativebloq.com/tag/wordpress).

• Community sites include Before I Die (beforeidie.cc/site), Fantelope (fantelope.com), Goodreads (goodreads.com), and iCheckMovies (icheckmovies.com).

• Dating services include eHarmony (eharmony.com), Grindr (grindr.com), OkCupid (okcupid.com), and Skout (skout.com).

• Location-based networking services include Badoo (badoo.com), Foodspotting (foodspotting.com/find/in/The-World), and Foursquare (foursquare.com).

• Microblogging services include FriendFeed (blog.friendfeed.com), Tumblr (tumblr.com), and Twitter (twitter.com/?lang=en).

• Photo-sharing sites include Cluster (cluster.co), Flickr (flickr.com), Instagram (instagram.com/?hl=en), and Photobucket (photobucket.com).

• Social networking sites include the dominant Facebook (facebook.com), Google Plus (plus.google.com), and MySpace (myspace.com).

• Video-sharing sites include Hulu (hulu.com), Vimeo (vimeo.com), Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), and YouTube (youtube.com).

All of these—whether free or fee-based—operate in a similar fashion. Users register, creating profiles; build their networks; and search through the corpus of content. They can make connections and share information/comments broadly, all from a variety of media devices, and have the ability to import or export to a variety of other sites.

Privacy Breaches: The Downside of Ubiquitous Internet Access

Few people can claim to never have experienced a potential breach of their private information in recent years. Here are some examples:

• Yahoo announced that a half-billion accounts were compromised. The company asserted that “a state-sponsored actor” instead of a regular cyber-criminal was involved in this 2014 action that wasn’t announced until September 2016. The theft itself is said to have occurred in late 2014. 

• In 2012, LinkedIn was hacked, but the full details and extent of the problem weren’t known until this past year. It took the company 4 years to contact the 165 million account holders about the hack. 

• In May 2015, the IRS databases were hacked, resulting in the release of personal information from tax forms. By February 2016, the agency admitted more than 700,000 returns had been hacked. 

• Florida-based 21st Century Oncology, which provides cancer care, announced in March 2016 that patient records on 2.2 million clients had been hacked, including patient information, Social Security numbers, and insurance information. 

• In September 2016, more than 68 million Dropbox users had their usernames and passwords compromised. 
• Perhaps most troublesome of all are the findings of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that the Russian government was responsible for hacking into databases and files in order to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. In a statement (schumer.senate.gov/newsroom), New York Senator Chuck Schumer notes that a bipartisan group in the Senate is pushing for a serious investigation: 
  

  The goal is to find out how extensive it is, how deep this is, what countries are doing this—it won’t be limited to just Russia and then to come up with conclusions on how to stop it. Our intel property in the government and some of our most important companies that employ tens of thousands of people in good paying jobs are hacked regularly. We have to look at all of this”

You’re Not Alone: Some Useful Information

• StartPage (startpage.com) bills itself as one of the two “only third party certified search engines in the world that do not record your IP address or track your searches.” GoDuckGo (duckduckgo.com) is another alternative for internet searching. You may want to give both of them a try! 

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Secure Messaging Guide (eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard) was still under construction at the time of this article, but Version 1.0 of this scorecard provided independent, reliable evaluations of “apps and tools based on a set of seven specific criteria ranging from whether messages were encrypted in transit to whether or not the code had been recently audited.” This is an important service from a respected organization. 

• The University of Texas–Austin Center for Identity released PrivacyCheck (identity.utexas.edu/privacycheck-for-google-chrome) last year as “a free browser extension that scans privacy policies online and illustrates the risk of sharing personal data with any given company.” Currently it works with Google Chrome. 

• The state of Washington has released a Privacy Modeling Tool (watech-beta.herokuapp.com) “designed to help you identify privacy laws based on personal information you wish to use” on both federal and Washington state laws. The tool includes a User Guide to Privacy as well.
   
• Amnesty International’s new Message Privacy Ranking (amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/10/which-messaging-apps-best-protect-your-privacy) assesses 11 messaging/app companies on their protection of user privacy. “If you think instant messaging services are private,” the organization notes, “you are in for a big surprise. The reality is that our communications are under constant threat from cybercriminals and spying by state authorities.”