A recent article recalls a past privacy scandal involving Facebook and British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. It also focuses on a report from business research firm, Insider Intelligence, which surveyed the U.S. public’s opinions on social media privacy. The firm surveyed over 1,800 people between the ages of 18 and 74 asking them how the felt about the way the nine major social media platforms protect their privacy and personal data.
AND the responses are pretty much what you would expect. Most folks either somewhat agreed, were neutral, or somewhat disagreed. Even so, people are still using these platforms, and the platforms are without a doubt selling our information to the highest bidder. Once information starts changing hands and companies get breached, our data enviably finds its way onto the Dark Web. This is where stolen data is bought and sold in marketplaces to cyber criminals who’d like to leverage the information for their own nefarious purposes.
So why should you be concerned about this? Well, criminals can use the information they have on you to impersonate you. So now we’re in the realm of identity theft, extortion, as well as larceny if they get into your financial accounts. So what can we do? Aside from beefing up security with multi-factor authentication and adopting a strong password policy (which we should be doing anyway), we can subscribe to a dark web monitoring service. This gives us some eyes into what’s floating around on the dark web about us and the other folks in our company. This then grants us the opportunity to properly react so we can ensure our accounts remain secure.
Lesson for the week. Don’t trust the social media platforms. Get dark web monitoring.
