Social media has a long memory and services can be used by anyone. Therefore, using common sense is required and the dangers of the services must be understoodHumans seek to impact other’s knowledge, with influencing taking either a benevolent or malevolent form. For example, advertising and education exemplify benign influence, aiming to enlighten people. A networked world has bestowed new communications styles for people. Traditional media has lost its monopoly as a sole communication and information platform. Indeed, new social media has expanded communication networks, where people can partake and obtain information about the public issues.
1. Is social media secure?
Social media is a goldmine for scammers and identity thieves because people add their personal information to services, which makes the work for scammers much easier. More open information sharing has enabled cybercriminals and state actors to find novel ways to pry into people's lives. For example, Social Search allows to anyone to look people from different social medias. As a result, social media services are subject to many security threats. Social media spying often precedes a cyberattack. Below, is listed some news on various methods used for spying on social media.
- The piece of news by Home Security Heroes on 15 worst-cases from identity thefts that rocked the USA. According to the insurance services company mySafety, there were 138,000 victims of identity theft in Finland in 2018, which was 30,000 more than last year.
- The assumption is that in a somasocial media, communication is rarely private. The TikTok service has been accused of spying and selling the data to the Chinese state. You can read more about the privacy and security concerns of TikTok in this Wikipedia article.
- “500 “500 million people data leak shakes LinkedIn” LinkedIn” CyberNews says someone put the data of that about 500 million LinkedIn users users’ information have been sold on a common hacker forum.
Question: Is Are social media secureservice safe to use? Answer: No, they are not.
Think carefully what information you can share about yourself or Metropolia on social media sites.
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Policies and principles to use social media in Metropolia University of Applied Science
- Metropolia aims to have a strong presence on social media, produce diverse and topical content for its followers and to strengthen its role as an influencer by having a responsible dialogue with other operators.
- Publishing content on a social media is encouraged at Metropolia. In other words, you can create a social media account for the project, the department, the unit hubs and the school units to improve visibility and communication with stakeholders.
- However, the employee or the student can’t use their personal credential on social media. You are prohibited from registering on a social media service using your school account, such as your school email address for the registration process.
- IT Services will create a separate user account and an email, for example, a company or organizational email address, on the purposes of the registration process.
- To obtain a new user account, an employee must make a service request to HelpDesk Services on the service request system of the university.
- The manager of the employee defines, who or whom the employees are responsible for the social media account of the project, the department, the unit hubs and the school units. Besides the former, the superior must determine a device or devices, which are used in communication purposes on a social media.
- If social media duties are part of an employee's work, the employee is responsible for the safety and appropriate use of the social media account.
- When signing in a social media service, it is mandatory to check the social media’s usage policies, such as whether an organization email address can be utilized similarly to a natural person’s email address for a sign-in. Typically, organizations can use their own emails, when using the services of the social media. Still, it is customary to mention, for instance, on the user profile that this account belongs to an official organization and the reasons why the account has been created. Then other users know that this account belongs to the Metropolia university.
- As the social media account in not needed anymore, the account must be disabled. Besides, the employee who is responsible for the social media account, must inform IT Services that the user account of the university is also redundant. Following the announcement, the IT Services removes and disables the organizational account of the university.
- When interacting in a social media, you must follow the communication principles of Communication Services and the university’s information classification practices.
3. Secure management of your social media account
- Currently, social media companies have enhanced the security of their products and services by implementing features such as multifactor authentication, saving logins on devices, and providing information about active login sessions. If using Metropolia's social media services is part of your official job, you are responsible for the security of your account. Make sure you use any security measures you may have, such as 2-step verification and a strong password.
- Your social media service provider does not usually guarantee the retention of data on your service, so make sure you have copies of the data transferred to the service elsewhere.
- Please review the settings that affect the privacy of your user profile and update them as necessary. You can also restrict your notification’s visibility from the settings of the device and the user account.
- It is better to remove little-used or “forgotten” social media accounts than to leave them unused. Unused accounts pose a security risk.
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4. Checklist for social media
- Use common sense, do not disclose any personal information about anyone. At worst, an outside party can exploit the information in scam attempts.
- Do not use the same password for social media services as for Metropolia's own services.
- Contacts from new people must always be treated with caution. It’s easy to impersonate another person on social media services.
- Malware spreads on social media in the same way as email. All messages containing links must be treated with caution.
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- Respect other users’ right for their privacy. Do not take pictures from other without their consent to do so. Privacy protection is a constitutional right in modern times.
- When encountering inappropriate behaviour online, report it to the system maintenance of the social media provider. The system administrators will remove the ill-suited users and investigate whether an information security incident has been occurred.
- If your privacy rights have been violated, file the crime to the police.
5. Secure data processing - Metropolia staff and students
The same data storage and processing guidelines apply to all social media channels. Only public material may be stored and / or published in the services.
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