Social Media Safety
What Is Cyber Safety?
Cyber safety is the safe usage of the internet, especially to protect against viruses, fraud, or other forms of attack. Being safe online is rule number one when using social media.
Is Your Information Safe?
Though you may think your information is private, encrypted, or locked away from others, everything has a way of being accessed. No matter how safe information is, there will always be a hack or hacker who can get around the protection. One major way your information can be compromised is through a data breach. Social media platforms will often have someone who hacks into the company’s database to steal user information. Along with data breaches, most of the big social media companies are overall not the most secure.
TikTok
TikTok is run by ByteDance, a Chinese-owned company whose headquarters are located in Beijing. Many are concerned about the company due to the Chinese Government having access to user’s data. TikTok has a handful of controversies which include being sued by the ICO for misusing children’s data. There have also been a couple of data breaches, one in 2023 resulting in the data confiscation of 89 million users.
Snapchat
Snapchat is owned by Snap Inc (A private owned company). Snapchat has had some controversies over its years of popularity. Snapchat obtains access to data to generate advertisements personal to the user. A major data breach in 2014 gave hackers access to the information of 4.6 million users. Another controversy was when multiple Snapchat employees abused data access to spy on users in 2019.
Meta
The company Meta covers a lot of ground because it owns a handful of social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, X, and Pinterest. Meta directly says they do not steal your data but use it for other Meta platforms and personal advertisements. Meta has controversies. Meta has had several data breaches, most notably in 2019 where the information of over 533 million users was exposed. Meta was fined $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext on their internal systems.
What To Do Now
All the companies talked about have common factors. They will never admit to stealing data and some of them flat out say “We don’t steal your data.” Most of these companies store your data but just because they’re not stealing and selling it doesn’t mean others can’t. There are a couple of ways you can make sure you are staying safe online. Every month, do an online check of what or who has your information. Make sure that no fishy or insecure sites have your email and password. Look out for spam messages so you can delete and report them.