BlogSecurity introduces an article by Sarah Turner.
Sarah Turner is a BA Hons in Business Studies and currently works as a Marketing Manager; she has specialised in the IT security sector for almost 2 years.

I have recently undertaken a project looking at the privacy and security policies of social networking sites, producing some interesting results. I started becoming curious about sites’ policies because it seems that more and more people are starting to use social networking sites. I’m always cautious about signing up to websites, but because I work in IT security that’s no real surprise. I started out by looking at some of the most popular sites – Bebo, Facebook, Flickr, Friends Reunited, LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and YouTube. I know that there are many security issues surrounding websites in general and specifically social networking sites – I have only highlighted the issues that I found relating to privacy and data security.

Many social networking sites are commercial enterprises owned by large, multinational organisations such as Yahoo! or Google. Many people believe ‘Tom’ to have started MySpace, but it was actually created by a company called eUniverse – there is an interesting video on YouTube about the history of MySpace, if you’re interested. Google owns YouTube, Yahoo! owns Flickr and Microsoft owns Windows Live Spaces. Google famously bought YouTube in October 2006, paying a staggering $1.65bn – but why? It’s all about data – and oh boy, does Google have tonnes of it on its users. Google never deletes data collected on its users and some day in the future, the day may come when it could make billions and billions from flogging it.

I’ve broken down my findings into a few different sections - all in all it’s pretty long and I wouldn’t want to subject people to reading the whole thing from start to finish!

I’ll post the next section, ‘Signing up’, in a few days’ time and will follow that with the following posts:

• Data processing and storage
• Inviting your friends to sign up
• Forgotten password
• I want to close my account
• What did I learn from this project?

For additional information, Sarah Turner can be contacted via our Contact form.