Why Social Networks Are Dangerous for Children and Adults

“Google it”, “tweet”, “repost”, “Instagram it” and so on – these words worked their way into everyday speech long ago and now feel like our own. Everyone online is signed up to at least one social network. It doesn’t have to be something like VKontakte; plenty of people join specialist sites tied to what they do for a living (programming, accounting and so on). We can’t imagine a day without our information fix. My own morning starts with turning off the alarm on my tablet and opening a news reader. I have to go through the domestic and foreign press and see what happened in the five hours I wasn’t looking. Then it’s email, then the feeds on Facebook and VKontakte. The whole thing takes about 30 minutes. Something tells me a lot of you reading this do much the same :).

I’m not going to tell you that this is bad or wrong. Quite the opposite: we keep moving forward, more and more technology appears, the flow of information grows, and people do their best to process all of it.

There is no shortage of articles about social networks. In some of them the authors go after the people who built these sites and tell readers that social networks steal your time and your mind. In others the same platforms are idealised out of all proportion – nothing to worry about at all. Every author has an opinion of their own, and I have no moral right to criticise it. In this article, though, I want to share mine, based on what I have seen and done myself.

That is how life turned out: from my school years onwards my work has been tied to computers. I was probably one of the first at school to own a computer, an IBM XT 486 – a mega-beast at the time :). Later my parents got us online (over dial-up) and I was gradually drawn into the world of the global network. Between 1996 and 1999 the Internet was little more than a loosely organised heap of information. Search engines had nothing you could call intelligent search, a “heavy” site took five to ten minutes to load, and sharing photos or listening to music online was pure science fiction. But in the space of five years everything changed, and changed fast. The Internet started arriving over dedicated broadband at around 1 Mbit/s, which was enough to open fairly heavy sites without waiting and to swap music, films and photos. That was when the first social networks appeared: Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki. That technical leap, and the sites it made possible, gave people a new way of getting closer to one another. Demand for sharing information meant more users, and more users meant more information. The Internet reached the point where somebody had to build intelligent search systems – systems that could gather material from every reachable “corner” of it and give the user a way to get at it. The software collectors that came out of that (web spiders, search bots, or web crawlers as English-language sources call them) began piling enormous volumes of data onto their servers, where intelligent systems processed it, sorted it and handed it back to the user in a usable form. And that is where things got interesting. What the search bots turned up included fragments of the online lives of millions of people going back to the 1990s: forum threads, public chat logs, comments left in guest books, all of it. Knowing somebody’s nickname – their virtual name – was effectively enough to dig up their entire history. In time, though, the search engines began filtering the oldest material out and pushing it aside to make room for newer data. Ranking came in, based on how often something was searched for, how often it was cited and other indicators. But information missing from the first pages of a search engine has not left the Internet. It is still sitting on servers, and anyone with the right programming knowledge can get to it.

What is happening on the Internet today? Almost everything a person does with information now ends up digitised. Notice that phone manufacturers pre-install the popular social network apps for you. Take a photo on your phone and it offers, almost at once, to post it to a social network. To find out about something on a supermarket shelf, all we do is photograph the barcode or the QR code, and a few seconds later the clever little “machine” hands us the description and other shoppers’ reviews. Voice recognition arrived on phones fairly recently: speak a command or a contact’s surname and the phone does as it is told and dials that person from the address book. And all this convenience rests on GPS, which lets the owner of even a cheap smartphone find their way around with real precision and share notes, music, photos and everything else pinned to an exact spot on the map. It is all wildly convenient; I use these services every day and can’t imagine doing without them. HOWEVER, behind all that convenience we should not forget that we live in a real world, and that world has thieves, fraudsters, lunatics, paedophiles, predators and other people living outside the law in it – which means the basic rules of safety still apply.

You will probably say – “Safety? What for? The Internet is a virtual world”. You would be wrong. The Internet stopped being virtual the moment you put real information about yourself into it. Think back to childhood, when our parents kept repeating: “Don’t talk to strangers”, “If you see something suspicious, call the police”, “If you see suspicious people following you on foot or in a car, run, or go somewhere busy, a shop, and ask to phone home” and so on. Those basic safety rules were put into us from birth; we follow them without thinking and we pass them on to our own children. Times change, and digital technology keeps pushing the horizon of the world we knew further out. Which means people today have to add something entirely new to what they know about staying safe.

Every Internet user has to forget about the notions of confidentiality and of information having a shelf life. Anything that reaches the network will be just as easy to find in a month, in six months, in a year, in five years and in twenty-five years! Notice that when you type a query into Google or Yandex, what comes back is dated all over the place. One page can carry material from 2005, from 2001, sometimes from 1997. Let me show you with an example how dangerous that is. Say you are a fifteen-year-old girl today. Fifteen is a good age: you start taking a real interest in the opposite sex, you want to look like the pop stars and actresses of the moment. Sadly, the limits of decency in today’s show business are so blurred that the clothes and the behaviour on screen are often bewildering, and teenagers soak all of it up and copy their idols. So a teenage girl trying to be “cool” quite literally starts undressing in front of her phone camera and posting the photos or videos to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and the rest, hoping to impress her friends and everyone around her. The effect is the exact opposite. Four years on, that fifteen-year-old is older and at university, surrounded by an entirely different crowd, and someone in that crowd will find the old photos or videos of her earlier life somewhere on the Internet. And even if nothing surfaces at university, there may come a day when she takes a job and ends up a well-known politician, a journalist or a television presenter. Attention gives people a reason to go digging for something compromising, and the odds are very good that they will find it online. The galling part is that you have nobody but yourself to blame, because at the time you did not think through where your own actions would lead.
The second problem, and to my mind the most important one, is criminals watching what children and teenagers do socially – burglars, predators, paedophiles and the rest. People from that section of society follow children and teenagers closely. They go through the photos and read the public conversations looking for anything useful. Useful means a phone number, the places somebody goes often (cinemas, cafes), where they study (school, nursery), a home address. Once an attacker has that, he will certainly find a use for it.

You are probably thinking – ” You would have to be a complete idiot to write out your home address”. Children, teenagers and even grown adults slip up and leave information about themselves online without ever realising it. I ran an experiment. I signed up to a couple of well-known social networks – lovetime.com and mamba.ru – and set out to pick a few girls and see how much useful information ordinary Internet searches would give me. The site shows me this much: star sign, age, city and a photo. From there I go looking for the matching account on VKontakte. The star sign narrows the birthday down to a month, the age gives me the year, and the name and the city rule out everyone else. Once I feed all that into the search, the few thousand people in that city come down to about 50 or 60 – few enough to go through by hand until I find the one I want. It takes very little time. Then we read the page for anything useful. We find links to newer services such as Foursquare, and those give us not only the home address but the pattern behind visits to particular places.

The study used a sample of 125 people, split into age groups: under 13, 14 to 17, 18 to 23, 24 to 29, and 30 and over.

The search method described above produced these results:

The numbers are not encouraging. Whatever their age, everybody leaves private information on the Internet, and criminals will certainly find a use for it.

As an illustration, here are some of the methods attackers use:
1) By following teenagers’ conversations, a predator or a paedophile can work out exactly where a teenager will be that evening, and when;
2) A professional thief can set up a page in a child’s name and start talking to a young Internet user. Naturally nobody suspects a thing: even parents who do keep an eye on who their child talks to rarely read the conversations themselves. And it is in that online chat that the attacker teases out details about the family, about where they are going and when. The child becomes, without knowing it, the one who points a burglar at their own home.
3) Kidnapping children for ransom. Online, children like to boast about what their parents do for a living and post photos of expensive new purchases, and that alone makes them targets. Using the same approach, criminals work out the routes the children take and how often they turn up in particular places, then snatch them at the least expected moment.
4) Fraud. With your mobile number in hand, someone can call you from a withheld number and introduce themselves as an employee of your mobile operator or your bank. They will explain that there is a problem with your number or your account and that they need some personal details from you: passport number, mother’s maiden name, secret word, password and so on. Suspecting nothing, you hand it all over, and some time later you find that money has gone from your bank account.

I want to give a few pieces of advice to everyone who uses the Internet, and to today’s parents in particular:
1) Keep an eye on what your children do online. The frightening thing is not that a child might land on a porn site; what should worry you far more is that they will join a social network and start talking to people there. Talk to your children about it as often as you can. Tell them that if a stranger, even one their own age, suggests meeting up, they have to tell you straight away;
2) This one applies to every user. Turn off automatic publishing of your location on your mobile devices. How often you turn up in the same place makes it easy to work out when you are away from home;
3) Do not check in at your home address on a service like Foursquare;
5) Don’t publish your mobile number for everyone to see, especially the number you use as a backup for recovering passwords to online banking and other services. If you really want a number out there, buy a separate SIM card for it – it will work out cheaper;
6) Restrict access to your photos. First, a photo will often give away where it was taken; second, photos of children and teenagers are a favourite of porn site owners looking to pull in customers. So don’t be shocked if somebody tells you later that they saw you on the front page of a porn site – the odds are they aren’t lying;
7) Before you write or post anything in public, think about how it might come back at you years from now.

Today’s Internet looks a lot like the Wild West. It is a world with almost no rules and almost no laws. Working out the measures, the software and the hardware that would make the Internet safe is a job for the national security agencies of every country and for private IT companies alike.

I am sure this will be cracked before long, but every Internet user should remember the old saying: “The drowning must save themselves”.

I hope this wasn’t too dull a read and that you got something useful out of it.
Thanks for your attention – good luck, and stay safe out there 🙂

Michael Dvornichenko Solution architect · SK.AI