Balancing identity and privacy on social networking sites

“BALANCING IDENTITY AND PRIVACY

ON SOCIAL NETWORKING

SITES”

Presented by:- SAKSHI JAINCSE 3rd year

INTRODUCTIONSocial networking sites have been rapidly adopted by children and, especially, teenagers and young people worldwide, enabling new opportunities for the presentation of the self, learning, construction of a wide circle of relationships

On the other hand, there are also concerns that social networking increases the likelihood of new risks to the self, these centering on loss of privacy, bullying, harmful contacts and more.

This presentation focuses on the importance of building safety considerations into the design and management of social networking sites, the imperative for greater attention to ‘at risk’ children in particular.

WHAT DOES PEOPLE THINK ?

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Why should students care about their digital identity?As members of a campus community, it is important

for students to know that their online actions can have impact.

Social media posts can show up in search engine queries.

Companies are no longer just looking at your resume. They want to know what you are doing (and saying) online too.

Students with a fluent grasp of social media can accelerate their learning, develop meaningful connections with peers, and grow their professional network.

What we do online can affect our face-to-face interactions…and vice versa.

Why should higher education concern about

students’ digital identity?We’re all digital students in the sense

that we are constantly learning how to use the social tools while they are constantly evolving.

Schools need to be intentional about how they incorporate digital identity development into their educational constructs.

Social media are not a trend or a fad that are going to someday evaporate.

We need to be proactive with teaching our students how to build their digital identity versus being reactive whenever they post something that we wish hadn’t made it onto the web.

Six ways to protect your identity online…

Use a password manager

Disable GPS and Wi-Fi on your mobile device until you need them

Read the access privileges for apps carefully, and make

good choices

Make yourself more difficult to

find on social media

Keep your work and personal

presences separate

Encrypt your connections

SECURE THE LINEVPNs serve as an encrypted tunnel that prevents bad guys from getting between you and the Internet in order to steal your login credentials or other sensitive information.

Over a VPN your ISP can see only your connection to the VPN.

You can use a free virtual private network client like OpenVPN to connect to a VPN service where you have an account, so you can browse the Web through an encrypted tunnel.

VPN

ENCRYPTION/AUTHENTICATION IPsec

TUNNELING

IMPLEMENTATION

IP header

• AUTHENTICATION

IP header

• ENCRYPTION

AH Data and TCP header

ESP header

ESP trailer

Data and TCP header

IP header

Data and TCP header

IP header

TUNNELING

STOP LEAVING PRIVATE DATA IN THE CLOUD

For sensitive data that you need to sync across devices,use an encrypted cloud storage service. You can build one by encrypting data on your PC before sending it to Dropbox, using free software such as BoxCryptor .

Two popular encrypted storage services are SpiderOak and Wuala. Both services bill themselves as “zero-knowledge solutions”.

You have to be comfortable with the company and trust that the service it is doing what it claims is to keep your data secure.

When you use SpiderOak,the password you choose is factored into the encryption keys generated by the SpiderOak client.

It provides storage for upto 2GB.The only way for anyone, even a

SpiderOak employee, to access your file is by inputting your password by guessing it.

Password-building best practices dictate you should choose a phrase of at least ten characters.

Use SpiderOak's desktop client for maximum security.

Wuala claims to encrypt and decrypt your data on a mobile device similar to the way it handles the task on your PC.

Wuala provides storage for upto 5GB.when you share folders from Wuala

using a Web link, the encryption key gets included in the URL.

Anyone who receives the URL can view the contents of that folder,and the key has to be sent to Wuala’s servers for decryption,that’s one instance where using Wuala is less secure.

TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION

Two-factor authentication requires you to enter a short numeric code in addition to your password to protect you from hacking and unauthorized account access.

The code usually comes from a smartphone application.

The best thing is that you can get most of your two-factor authentication codes from Google’s Authenticator app for Android and iOS.

Authenticator automatically works with accounts such as Dropbox, Evernote, Google, LastPass, and Microsoft.

Using your browser’s incognito mode won’t keep you completely anonymous, either, but it will block websites from reading the cookies and history stored in your browser.

The downside of services like SpiderOak and Wuala is that there is no way of retrieving your password and can provide only a password hint that you entered during the signup process.

Two-factor authentication isn’t foolproof, but it does add a hurdle to help deter anyone who wants to get into your account.

POINTS TO NOTE

CONCLUSION Every organization that produces social networks should implement strong measures during creation of such applications to be secure in their operation. They further need to implement unassailable access controls to prevent exposure of personally identifiable information.

On the other side, users should manage how much information they reveal about themselves and their peers.

What is required,is balancing between the identity and privacy.

So should you still blindly jump into the race of socializing or rather implement stringent solutions that balance both our identity and privacy to help mitigate the risks and concerns?

REFERENCESwww.informationweek.in/informationweek/persp

ective/295864/social-networks-balancing-identity-privacy

www.eduniverse.org/digital-identity-social-media-privacy-balance-and-being-radical

Alessandro Acquisti , Ralph Gross, Imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook, June 28-30, 2006, Cambridge, UK

Altman, I. The environment and social behavior---privacy, personal space, territory, crowding. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1975.

Danah Boyd , Jeffrey Heer, Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster, p.59.3, January 04-07, 2006

Behrouz A.Forouzan,Data Communications and Networking.ch-23,26