In the News
Facebook continues their own investigation into accounts spreading intentionally falsified news. In Facebook opens up ‘overwhelming data set’ for election research, Russell Brandom discusses Facebook’s new research initiative, which will study all of the links sent and shared on its platform. Brandom states that the data will only be provided to vetted sources and is estimated to include over 2 million URLs per week.
Our Take
Social media has not only become an outlet for social interactions, but also a major platform for users to view and stay up to date on current news. False news stories and purposefully incorrect statements threaten to alter user’s perceptions of world events in a manipulative way. Facebook’s effort–finally–to understand and prevent attempts to use their platform for malicious purposes is a positive step to protect users, their data, and the accuracy of the content that they see on the site. As information security continues to mature as a field, more and more companies will hopefully begin to consider not only the positive use cases of their products, but also the “misuse cases”–the ways in which strangers can subvert the intended purpose of a product or technology in order to cause harm.
Recommendations
What can you do to protect yourself from misuse of technology that directly or indirectly affects you?
- Consider misuse cases yourself! How could someone take advantage of the technologies that you use to threaten the security of your information or physical person? What can you do to make that more difficult?
- Avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket: don’t store everything important to you in a single place (particularly if you haven’t carefully protected that place), don’t get all of your information from a single source, etc.
- Recognize the gap between what a service is intended for and the actual way that people use it. These gaps can be ingenious, or dangerous, or both.