Is online privacy an unattainable dream?

03/03/10 posted by Annie

You might've been among the hundreds of affected users who found their inbox flooded with other people's private correspondence in the last few days - ranging from the mundane to the explicitly personal. If you were, you probably found it unsettling at the very least. This Facebook glitch is the latest to spark concern over privacy on Facebook and other sites, which are entrusted by millions worldwide to store and share their personal information.

While the company isn't commenting on what caused the privacy glitch or how they're fixing it, TechCrunch author Jason Kincaid did obtain a detailed overview of Facebook's QA and code deployment policies. However, this hasn't stopped indignant Facebookers from questioning the company's often criticised privacy policies and ability to protect users' data. As written by Mr Kincaid, "'private' should not mean 'this will remain hidden until we accidentally break something.'"While Google is slightly past the Buzz fiasco for now, Facebook's prospects of rolling out a Gmail-style webmail product are not looking very inviting.

And what's to be said about Twitter's phishing attacks of late, in which many users have been tricked into giving their passwords to malicious sites? The attacks are effective as they seemingly come from trusted friends on your network. They normally come in the form of a message reading "lol, is this you", and a link which will ask for authentication. Users who click that link and enter their details are inadvertently letting spammers take over their accounts, which are then used to spam the same direct message to all their friends. Identical attacks caught Facebook users off guard last year.

CNN Tech says there are two big trends making us vulnerable to phishing attacks, firstly the short URL craze, which sees links being obscured by shorter URLs. Even though market leader bit.ly deactivates malicious links as soon as they're found, users have become conditioned to click on any manner of short links not knowing where they lead. Another threatening social web trend is that Facebook, Twitter, Google and others let you log into third party sites using your same details. It's hard to detect when a login request is authentic, so phishing attacks can be very hard to detect by the untrained eye.

Some say it's only to be expected when we spend so much time on the social media, and especially when we find that companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on their users. Information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums and other sites is fair game. While this is the last thing online users expect to happen to their casual comments, it's yet another reminder that people need to be fully conscious of what they do on social networking sites.