Threats, crimes and issues of privacy of users’ information shared on online social networks

Social media has become an important aspect of our lives since it has infiltrated many crucial sectors including education, healthcare, entertainment and exploration. In turn, this expansion has given rise to the popularity of several online social media applications like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook in social networking. People like to share their private information with each other and they do not know what could possibly happen when they willingly disclose this kind of information or how they could prevent unwanted disclosure of their personal data. There are indeed many users who are unaware of the serious risk to the private data they publish on social media as they do not realize that these information may be used for harmful purposes and that the privacy of their data may be violated and tampered with. Since it is easier to identify social media users through their multimedia data than via any other type of data, multimedia content represents the greatest source of risk because it essentially contains pictures, videos and audio clips that jeopardize their privacy and make them more vulnerable to harm. In this paper, we will discuss the threats of the social media sites that may target the data of the users, we will also tackle the issue of privacy and security in these sites and we will discuss some of the rules and proposed solutions for protecting the data of the users of the aforementioned sites.