Security and privacy in social networks- Cambridge Analytica and manipulation with data’’

Humans are social creatures, and social interaction is very important part of life. Back in the day the social circle used to be small, family and close friends. And for the most part, it was people nearby. With the invention of communication tools such as the fax, the phone and later the internet the circle gradually grew larger and larger, and the ways of maintaining that social communication grew more complex. In the beginning if someone wanted to share something with others, they might meetup, or maybe talk on the phone, but today they will likely share that via social media. Studies have found that about 50.64% of the world’s population is using social media[1], and that in average in Facebook, one of the most famous social networks, a person has 338 friends.Because of this, the number of private data shared in social media is tremendous, and therefore the risk of those data being inadvertently shared or leaked is also very big. Social networks are ubiquitous in today’s digital life. It is estimated that nowadays more than half of the world’s population is using social media in one form or another. This wide reach understandably causes worries of lack of privacy, of safety for us and our data. We are going to focus more on Facebook as a concrete example of what can go wrong when social media goes awry. It being one of the oldest and largest social network websites, it has had its fair share of problems that have caused massive personal data leaks.This paper will go through the possible risks that social media usage bring about, and we’ll also go through some of the big privacy scandals that have happened lately such as Cambridge Analytica. Lastly we’ll see what we as a user can do to have our personal data as safe as possible