Privacy concerns with social networking services

It has been suggested that this article should be split into articles titled Potential dangers of social networking sites, Privacy concerns of Facebook and Concerns of Snapchat. (discuss) (June 2020)

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.^[1]

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. Privacy concerns with social networking services is a subset of data privacy, involving the right of mandating personal privacy concerning storing, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Social network security and privacy issues result from the large amounts of information these sites process each day. Features that invite users to participate in—messages, invitations, photos, open platform applications and other applications are often the venues for others to gain access to a user's private information. In addition, the technologies needed to deal with user's information may intrude their privacy.

The advent of the Web 2.0 has caused social profiling and is a growing concern for internet privacy.^[2] Web 2.0 is the system that facilitates participatory information sharing and collaboration on the Internet, in social networking media websites like Facebook and MySpace.^[2] These social networking sites have seen a boom in their popularity beginning in the late 2000s. Through these websites many people are giving their personal information out on the internet. These social networks keep track of all interactions used on their sites and save them for later use.^[3] Issues include cyberstalking, location disclosure, social profiling, third party personal information disclosure, and government use of social network websites in investigations without the safeguard of a search warrant.