Hyves for criminals - A Case Study Showing the privacy risks of social networks

Social networks are very popular today and the number of members is increasing. People post a lot of information on these networks and it’s relatively easy to get the information out of it. It is only possible if a profile is public or you have a direct or indirect friendship with the person. The networks contain a lot of privacy-sensitive information about the members. They post for example messages on their profiles about what they did in the past, or they plan to do in the future. A risk is that people can misunderstand the visibility of their profile and of course the information on the profile. If people make their profile public it’s visible for everyone in the world. The second risk is that some members like to have a lot of friends and they simply accept every invitation from others. We try to expose that these risks are serious. The contribution of this paper is to unveil the risks of social networks and demonstrate how these networks can be abused. We lay out in a case study how a specific social network, Hyves, can be used to make it interesting for criminals.