Privacy and Security Aspects of Social Media: Institutional and Technological Environment

Legitimate as well as illegitimate organizations and entities are gaining access to information about social media (SM) users through illegal, extralegal, and quasi-legal means. Worse still, many organizations and individuals using SM have become targets and victims of cybercrimes. SM have also led to an exposure of unethical and illegal conducts within some organizations. One estimate suggested that 36 % of social networking users have reported experiencing mal-ware attacks through their profiles. Another study suggested that one in four companies have become cybercrime victims via social networking sites. Likewise, about a quarter of employers surveyed by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics in 2009 had disciplined an em-ployee for improper activities on social networking sites. Organizations that fail to take appropri-ate technological and behavioral measures related to SM are likely to suffer reputation damages, loss of customers ' confidence, and other types of economic losses. The goal of this paper is to develop a framework that provides a simple, explicit mechanism for understanding privacy an