Should I Be Concerned About Social Media Data Leaks?

The vulnerability of data is a complex issue, but it is essential to understand and discuss. As a society, we can see that security and privacy concerns are growing. Data leaks are a common issue with social media platforms and mitigating this security risk is difficult.

Technology brought into our homes, and businesses can be highly invasive of privacy, and social media platforms have had concerning data breaches over recent years. These breaches expose personal information, including email addresses, phone numbers, and location. Adding to the security concerns and risks are the terms of service agreements for social media platforms that indicate they gain access to contact details, text messages, microphone, and camera. While many apps on phones have access to the camera and microphone, some of these applications have the ability to record from the camera and microphone.

Consider that not only can a social media platform record information on you; it also has access to text message history, photos, and the location logs on your account. This kind of access to data concerns corporate businesses, especially those with stringent security requirements and privacy policies.

Your recorded data can be sold to external third parties. In some cases, your consent is inadvertently given when terms of services agreements are accepted without users understanding the extent of their permissions.

Smartphones are also problematic for many of the same reasons as the apps downloaded onto the devices. Adding to this complexity is our collective dependency on smartphones even within a work context. Most people use one smartphone for both private and business use.

To better understand how we begin to protect our data, we need to have a better understanding of the risks involved with engaging with social media platforms where security confidence is low. From a day to day operational perspective these concerns are generally thrown into the too hard basket, and are often casually dismissed.

Lucidity IT has taken these data security concerns very seriously and acted swiftly to remove our company from these social media platforms. We have invested heavily in building our company social media presence over the years, however it is our view that the security and privacy concerns far outweigh the benefits of using social media for business. Social media terms of service agreements directly conflict with our company privacy policies, as such, it is not suitable for Lucidity IT to be using these platforms.

We will continue to look more closely at the broader issue that smartphones pose regarding security risks. We are also reviewing privacy concerns with professional networking social media platforms. This will be a step by step process for our company that has begun with removing our company social media accounts as our first step to address these issues.

Are you concerned about data privacy or leaks? Let's discuss it. Get in touch with our team today.

Thanks for reading,

Company Bio

Lucidity IT specialise in Cloud Solutions delivering market-leading virtualisation and cloud infrastructure solutions that are reliable, scalable and secure. From multi-cloud strategy to traditional IT infrastructure solutions, Lucidity IT will help you prioritise and plan your IT projects to ensure you are utilising the maximum benefit of your IT investments. Get in touch today!

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