Social Networks ‟ Benefits, Privacy, and Identity Theft: KSA Case Study

Abstract—Privacy breaches and Identity Theft cases are increasing at an alarming rate. Social Networking Sites (SN’s) are making it worse. Facebook (FB), Twitter and other SN’s offer attackers a wide and easily accessible platform. Privacy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is extremely important due to cultural beliefs besides the other typical reasons. In this research we comprehensively cover Privacy and Identity Theft in SNs from many aspects; such as, methods of stealing, contributing factors, ways to use stolen information, examples and other aspects. A study on the local community was also conducted. In the survey, the participants were asked about privacy on SN’s, SN’s privacy policies, and whether they think that SN’s benefits outweigh their risks. A social experiment was also conducted on FB and Twitter to show how fragile the systems are and how easy it is to gain access to private profiles. Results from the survey are scary: 43 % of all the accounts are public, 76 % of participants do not read the policies, and almost 60 % believe that the benefits of SN’s outweigh their risks. Not too far from this, the results of the experiment show that it is extremely easy to obtain information from private accounts on FB and Twitter. Keywords—social network; identity theft; fraud; privacy; fake identities I