Digital BreadCrumbs: MIT Tech Review Says Social Networking Leaves Real Clues
MIT Technology Review recently revealed research which proves that information posted on social networking sites like twitter and facebook can be used to determine someone’s location and track their movements.
Nitesh Dhanjani, a well-known cybersecurity researcher and author, showed in his presentation how data-collection programs can be created using the tools provided by the sites themselves to track a person’s movements using the subject’s posts. Dhanjani’s presentations showed how he could track the movements of celebrities and politicians (is there a difference these days?) using their tweets.
Dhanjani also showed how sensitive business information, such as a merger, can be tracked using connections on the popular business networking site LinkedIn.
Dhanjani’s presentation has several notable implications, for both the personal and professional impacts of social networking. For your average person posting photos and connecting with friends, it should at least give pause to those who post information that is perhaps more detailed than it needs to be. Parents need to be especially aware of what their kids are posting as well, and remember that something as unobtrusive as a school t-shirt can help establish the location of a child. 99 times out of 100, this means nothing, but all parents need to guard against the one time it will.
For businesses, the implications are more severe. Depending on the industry, social networking may or may not be a desired activity. Either way, if social networking is revealing sensitive information about the company, that’s an undesired result. Because of this, many businesses are moving towards software or hardware protection that records information about employees web habits in addition to virus-blocking programs.
One IT security professional jokes that legitimate software now does everything that made us “freak out” about malware. Dhanjani considers the downside along with the upside:
“Social media is like a cocktail party,” he said. “In order to get something out of it, you have to give something up.”
Filed under: Internet Safety News
I think that now we can define this generation geek largely influenced by social networks. Many Internet users have registered at least one social network that is personal (Facebook), professional (MySpace) and microblogging (Twitter), photo sharing, social publishing and so on. One component of social networking, as we have seen together, it is almost always bundled with 2.0 sites (and others).