Social networking and making friends on Web2 sites continue to rise in popularity, but these platforms are also an accessible target for spyware. With Web2 apps, such as social networks and blogs, hackers tend to be on the tails of the increasing number of people using them.
Social networking platforms represent two main types of danger: technological and social. Basically, millions of people can upload content on Web2 sites, and criminal users are continuously attempting to post malware on these sites. An increasing number of people are disclosing sensitive personal information on social networking sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Because of this, they are more likely to fall for phishing attacks, which appear more genuine because of the information they have collected.
Added to that, when you sign in to your Google or Facebook account, your identity is checked through a central server. Even though it may seem convenient to use these already-set-up accounts to log in, it raises privacy concerns. As you use your account, these big intermediaries will gather metadata, such as when and for how long you used the service, where you were, and what other online activities you did during that time. Often, this information is used to make ads that are more relevant to you. It can be surprising how quickly you start seeing ads for something you looked up while your activity was being tracked. And ads seem pretty harmless compared to other things that could be realized with this metadata, such as building political ad profiles to target with specific content during elections.
Either way, the only remedy for the problems for centralized data control is providing users with custody of their own data.
