Mitigating Social Media Privacy Concerns - A Comprehensive Study

The growth of social media will not decelerate anytime soon. Unfortunately, with the growth of new platforms and users, privacy risks are increasing. Many default privacy settings leave new users of social networking sites open and vulnerable to cyberstalking, intelligence gathering, and even identity theft! Thankfully, there are ways to combat these privacy weaknesses through built-in privacy settings. Through review of current articles regarding social media intelligence, privacy settings are found to be adequate, although applying these settings in a successful manner proves to be a monumental undertaking. Although, these settings are counter-intuitive and difficult to set up. This is where educational platforms such as Digital-PASS and open-sourced tools such as SocialScore respectively can greatly benefit users through gamification or generated reports related to cybersecurity best practices [6]. In fact, it appears that the best methods of preventing such social media intelligence gathering begins with the education of users and the use of third party privacy evaluation tools. This study currently studies the three most common social media in the United States (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), although future research should be directed towards popular social media sites outside of the U.S. and sites which remain less popular in terms of user traffic. Overall for the three platforms that were studied, Digital-PASS and SocialScore are proven to both practical and applied solutions to the ever growing problem known as social media privacy.