Written by Nur Hawa Shafiqa
Over the past decade, technology has transformed our social landscape. Social apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more are designed to share information. Social sites are intended to connect people; even long lost friend can meet. Not only that, the apps are also important to business organization especially to expand their business and for marketing approach – social media can reach wider audiences.
Today, over 2.5 billion people have signed up to social media for own purposes and Facebook is on top of list (Social Pilot, 2017). To date, more than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook – is it safe?
Social media users should know that sharing pictures online have several disadvantages. Today’s smart devices come with GPS technology. When users uploaded photos on social sites, it will disclose user’s location via geo-tagging. Social apps friends or anyone who can see the post (depends on users’ setting) are aware that the owner of the house is away during the posting time. This can invite anyone to break the house while the owner was not at home.
Smartphone geo-tagging is high risk enough. But there are more risks associated with photo posting that user unaware of. A photo in front of the house could reveal the address of yours. Any photo such as children’s school logo could expose, thus possibly let any *lurkers know which school your children attended to. Such pictures can also expose users’ personal information without they realized it, which can be unsafe if it falls into the wrong hands.
*lurkers – people who look at your social media and do not leave comments or messages.
A simple right-click on computer’s mouse and you can steal someone’s photos without their knowledge while screen shot are the option to steal photos for the site which users’ choose to disable downloads. Stealing photos uploaded in social media is a terrible thing. The perpetrators may have bad intention – edit the photos to be nude photo and probably sell it to the public for money.
Remember to turn on your privacy setting and control everyone who can see your post. Remove anybody from your social sites’ friend lists who you do not know well to avoid such things mentioned above happen in future.