Secure Social Society?

John Cunningham — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:52:05 +0000

In the world of social networking, security is essential. You wouldn’t want your identity compromised would you? Perhaps a major news outlet’s Facebook account is compromised; this can be detrimental and extremely embarrassing for the entity. We can all imagine the outcome of such an event. But what about the average person? While your identity can’t be completely compromised via the social web, you can have often embarrassing information posted to your profile without your consent. A few years back on MySpace, you would repeatedly see unauthorized bulletin posts. People would unknowingly give out their password to a third party, thus allowing the third party to post unsolicited items on that particular profile. To combat this, MySpace implemented notifications that you where being directed off-site, and this issue virtually ceased. Today, you really don’t see compromises of that nature anymore.

This being said, Social networking has the uncanny ability to inform your average user of certain security flaws inside and outside the social web. Does it mean it’s their responsibility? Not necessarily, but things like unnecessary bandwidth consumption were introduced with those security flaws. Essentially, that means more money and energy wasted; no responsible business would condone such a practice.

Roughly a year ago another serious Adobe Flash exploit was discovered. Noticing this, I quickly configured the Noscript plugin on Mozilla Firefox to block flash. A few weeks later I was surprised that MySpace practically forced users to download the new version of Adobe Flash player. If you didn’t do it, you couldn’t listen to any music. The many audiophiles I know, myself included, happily accepted the update.

Social networking has a huge role in how society functions today. It can also play an informative role in maintaining a secure system. That being said, should administrators of social networking entities inform the average person of security flaws that can impact anything outside the social web? If changes like this where implemented, I’m sure the web would be a slightly more secure place. And who wouldn’t want that?

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Secure Social Society?

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