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Think Your Data Is Private Because You’re Not on Social Media? Think Again.

Just because you’re not on Facebook or Twitter doesn’t mean your data is safe from social media or their clever algorithms. In two different studies, researchers found evidence that your privacy is no longer in your hands, even if you abstain from social media.

The studies, conducted at the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, found that they could predict a person’s posts on social media with 95% accuracy, even if they never had an account to begin with. The scientists got all the information they needed from a person’s friends, using posts from fewer than 10 contacts to build a mirror image of a person not even on the social network.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, looked at more than 30 million public posts on Twitter (excluding retweets) from a total of 13,905 English-language users (attempting to eliminate bots and non-personal accounts) to populate their model. By using data provided by just 8 or 9 of a user’s contacts, the researchers were able to show that the tweets of friends allowed them to predict quite a bit about the original user. The original user’s Tweets allowed them to predict future tweets with an accuracy rate of roughly 64% and the user’s contacts gave them enough data to predict behavior with an accuracy rate of 61%. So, go ahead and delete your account, but information about you is still going to be generated (and pretty accurately) if you have a close relationship with at least 8 people who use the platform.

This analysis showed that “information within the Twitter messages from 8 or 9 of a person’s contacts make it possible to predict that person’s later tweets as accurately as if they were looking directly at that person’s own Twitter feed.”

“You alone don’t control your privacy on social media platforms,” University of Vermont professor Jim Bagrow said in a statement. “Your friends have a say too.” And even when you delete your social media accounts, if your friends are still there, tech giants are able to build profiles on you. This is already a concern that privacy advocates have about Facebook, called “shadow profiles.”

Now, there is a mathematical upper limit on how much predictive information a social network can hold. They can’t know everything about you, but they can know some things.

So why is this information important? Businesses who want to sell you things or government agencies who want information about you can use this information to their benefit. Companies or agencies may not be able to find out your darkest secrets, but they can figure out things like your political or religious affiliation and products you might be interested in. The same things platforms like Facebook and Twitter know (and sell) about their users.

The researchers went on to acknowledge that their research “raises profound questions about the fundamental nature of privacy—and how, in a highly networked society, a person’s choices and identity are embedded in that network.”

“There’s no place to hide in a social network,” said
co-author Lewis Mitchell.

Professor James Bagrow, also an author of the paper, confirmed: You alone don’t control your privacy on social media platforms. Your friends have a say too.

In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers that the social network collected data on nonusers for “security purposes.” That includes people’s contact list when they use Facebook’s mobile app, which the company uses to suggest friend recommendations, it explained.

In response to the study, a Facebook spokeswoman said the company doesn’t build profiles on nonusers, even if it’s collecting data on them. “If you aren’t a Facebook user, we can’t identify you based on this information, or use it to learn who you are,” the company said in a statement.

The study shows there’s only so much you can control in terms of your own privacy and security online. As careful as you are online, the study suggests that you’re only as private as your friends have been.

Social Media and its Impact on Divorce

Studies have shown a link between social media use and a decrease in people’s quality of marriage

Can you name one person in your family, or among your friends, or peers at work that does not have a Facebook account? I seriously doubt it. Chances are much greater that they all have Twitter, Instagram, and a number of other social media accounts as well.

And in today’s social media savvy world, the courtroom is no different. When divorce is involved, the question of electronic evidence, and social media evidence, in particular, comes into play in various ways. Modern relationships fall hazard to the sometimes illicit goings-on of spouses that end up publicized for the entire world to see (and “like” or comment on) on the Internet.

According to one study, “Results show that using social networking services is negatively correlated with marriage quality and happiness, and positively correlated with experiencing a troubled relationship and thinking about divorce.” Another source adds that social media “evidence can also highlight character attributes in custody arrangements, hidden assets such as boats and cars in alimony settlements, contradict oral testimonies and more.”
In many situations, focusing more on a person’s social media friends and presence can detrimentally affect a person’s real-life relationship. Some studies have shown that social media activity played a part in one out of seven divorces.

Evidence in Divorce Cases

Not only is social media a growing cause for divorce, now it is being used as evidence in divorce cases. It can be used to demonstrate infidelity, and in some states may impact the amount of alimony awarded. Social media use may also be admitted for other purposes including hiding assets. If there are pictures or statements on social media that refer to these assets, the evidence may be admitted for this purpose. Additionally, it can demonstrate that a person is unfit as a parent. It may show the parent smoking, doing drugs, or drinking alcohol around their children. It may also show the parent allowing their children to engage in risky behavior which indicates the children are not safe with the parent.

Web Preserver aggregates some startling statistical figures to drive home this point:

81% of attorneys discover social networking evidence worth presenting in court
66% of cases involving divorce employ Facebook as one of their principal evidence sources
1/3 of all legal action in divorces cases is precipitated by affairs conducted online

You can’t argue with facts. Social media is affecting relationships and being used in divorce litigation in serious and important ways.

What Evidence is Admissible?

According to one periodical, a spouse’s posts on social media platforms are admissible as evidence in the United States during divorce proceedings, given that they are not procured illegally. Also, an opposing attorney or the estranged husband or wife is not legally allowed to open false accounts with the purpose of “Friending” them in order to gain access to particular photos or posts that may be damning. Spouses are not legally permitted to come by those same posts via “hacking” or other equivalently malicious means.

So be careful what you share…posts and photos that are made public are able to be seen or inspected by anyone in the world. That material is fair game to be admitted as evidence for or against someone.

Guidelines for Social Media Usage during Divorce

Once a divorce is pending, spouses should expect that they will be under close personal scrutiny by their spouse and his or her lawyer. This is a common time for social media activity to be investigated. Individuals who are going through divorce should proceed with extra caution and assume that people who they do not actually intend to see their posts will see the posts and should proceed with this assumption. Additionally, their posts may be reposted to friends’ pages and then other people can view them. You can’t always rely on your privacy settings.

Divorcing spouses should be very mindful about what they post because anything can be taken out of context. Spouses should carefully censor what they post and avoid making any type of statement or posting any type of video or image that could be used against them. Additionally, they should ask friends and family not to post any embarrassing comments, photos or videos of them that may paint them in a negative light.

Due to the public nature of social media, it should not be used as a support system. Many online friends may not actually be that trustworthy or even close to a person and may reveal shared information to the other spouse. Spouses should avoid talking about their legal case or complaining about their spouse in such a public forum.

Conclusion

States will differ in how social media posts are admitted and employed during a divorce trial. But in most cases, posts on social networking platforms are admissible as evidence. They may prove that someone did not comply with a protective order, prove financial status through photographic evidence, affect cases involving custody of children, and much more. Being aware of how it may affect a divorce client is paramount to reaching a favorable result in the courtroom

Do You Speak Emoji?

Emojis are now a part of our culture and are being used as a way to communicate everything from emotions to soliciting drugs. Marketers are going as far as to mine emojis in social media the same way they mine data; to determine the emotion behind a brand. Some speculate it will morph into a language in and of itself. This is certainly true among criminals and drug dealers as we have seen first hand in our social media investigations. As we dig deeper into this subject, it is important to establish some baseline knowledge.

Let’s start with some history.

The most current statistics I have found on Emojis shows that there are now 2,623 official unicode emojis. Each day 5 BILLION emojis are used in Facebook Messenger alone and 60 million are used daily in Facebook.

Emojis were first used in Japan (the country where it originated) somewhere around 1997. In 1999 Shigetaka Kurita created the first widely-used set of emoji.

Emoji usage in marketing messages has rapidly increased at an annual growth rate of over 775 percent.

Can Emojis Be Used In Court?

We will be hearing much more on this subject, no doubt. Currently, this has been looked at by several law professors as well as attorneys and law enforcement. What if emojis have multiple meanings? How can one be sure it was meant for criminal purposes?

Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in US court opinions, with over 30 percent of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to “emoji” and “emoticon” that show up in US court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case, but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger issue for courts to contend with.

Still, it’s rare for cases to turn on the interpretations of emoji. “They show up as evidence, the courts have to acknowledge their existence, but often they’re immaterial,” Goldman says. “That’s why many judges decide to say ‘emoji omitted’ because they don’t think it’s relevant to the case at all.” But emoji are a critical part of communication, and in cases where transcripts of online communication are being read to the jury, they need to be characterized as well instead of being skipped over. “You could imagine if you got a winky face following the text sentence, you’re going to read that sentence very differently than without the winky face,” he says.
The Verge: Emoji are showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared

For now Emojis can be used by investigators through investigative consultants and software platforms as a “tip” that there may be something illegal going on. Like anything in social media, it is a piece of a larger puzzle, but one in which needs to be understood.

How To Identify Fake News In Social Media

Social media is a constant stream of shared photos and videos, all of which get liked, commented on, retweeted, etc. But can you spot fake news from the actual truth?

“In today’s world, nobody can tell for sure that the information they receive is 100% accurate and reliable,” says Janey Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. “Even experts have a hard time weeding out fake accounts and automatic messages.”

Bots Make Everything Worse

Bots are a form of artificial intelligence that can mimic human behavior. They can retweet a story or push a link, aiming to polarize people. Many are linked to Russia. “What the Russian bots are trying to do is sow discord and make us fight,” says Randall Minas Jr., assistant professor and head of the Information Technology Management Association at the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii.

Bots pick up on keywords or hashtags in controversial topics and use algorithms to create and spread extreme views that emotionally arouse people. “Those messages can create a perception of serious political polarization and huge divisions in society,” says Lee.

Networks of bots can spread messages quickly, fooling social media platforms and creating the perception that a topic is trending, when in fact it’s just being posted and retweeted by computers. People then believe that these trending topics reflect what most people think.

“Bots don’t create trends, they amplify them. That’s what we saw in Florida when David Hogg became a trending topic on multiple platforms. Bots were pushing that,” says Sam Huxley, practice chair of risk and business strategy, for the communications firm LEVICK. He’s referring to the claims that “crisis actors,” not actual students, were playing the roles of the teenagers who survived the Parkland school shootings.

How Can You Spot Fake News?

First of all, never assume that all the news in your feed is true.

Then:

Question the source. If a story comes from a newspaper, is it from a reputable site? Take The Denver Guardian, for example. It was cited often in 2016 but did not exist and listed an empty car park as its address.
Look for confirmation. If you don’t see a story across mainstream media, there’s probably a good reason why. “Mainstream media is motivated by getting an audience.” Huxley says.
Check the facts with third-party sites like Snopes and Politifact. But check quickly. Sometimes by the time a claim is researched and proven false, it may have already reached millions of accounts.
Call out fake news you see in your network — but do it privately. “What polarizes people further is calling them out publicly. Then people get defensive because it makes them look stupid or gullible for posting it in the first place.” Huxley says. Botcheck.me can check Twitter for bots, and you can log in to Facebook from a computer to see if you’ve liked or followed a page created by the organization behind the Russian bots.
Don’t assume video is real. Again, check your sources.
Spot the bot warning signs. Does this person post about only one topic? Who else do they follow? Do they post or tweet hundreds of times a day, trying to get their message out before they get caught? Are there a lot of typos or grammatical errors? Do they post in multiple languages? Botcheck.me can check Twitter for bots, and you can log in to Facebook from a computer to see if you’ve liked or followed a page created by the organization behind the Russian bots.
Recognize your biases. We are all inclined to agree with information we already believe and to discount information contrary to our beliefs.
Watch out for transfers of trust. If your best friend shares something, you’re likely to believe it. We trust information posted by people we trust, and that trust transfers to the message, regardless the message’s origin.

Fake news is designed to provoke a specific response or incite agitation against an individual or a group of people. This fake news can spread like wildfire over the internet, particularly on Facebook or Twitter. Furthermore, identifying it can be a tricky task. That is where a classification tool developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE comes in, automatically analyzing social media posts and processing vast quantities of data.

“Our software focuses on Twitter and other websites. Tweets are where you find the links pointing to the web pages that contain the actual fake news. These news items are often hosted on websites designed to mimic the web presence of news agencies and can be difficult to distinguish from the genuine sites. In many cases, they will be based on official news items, but in which the wording has been altered,” explains Prof. Ulrich Schade of Fraunhofer FKIE, whose research group developed the tool.

To filter out fake news, the researchers employ machine learning techniques that automatically search for specific markers in texts and metadata. Linguistic errors are also a red flag. This is particularly common when the author of the fake news was writing in a language other than their native tongue. In such cases, incorrect punctuation, spelling, verb forms or sentence structure are all warnings of a potential fake news item. Other indicators might include out-of-place expressions or cumbersome formulations.

“When we supply the system with an array of markers, the tool will teach itself to select the markers that work. Another decisive factor is choosing the machine learning approach that will deliver the best results. It’s a very time-consuming process, because you have to run the various algorithms with different combinations of markers,” says Schade.

So the next time you decide to retweet, share, or comment on a picture or video make sure you know exactly where it came from and if it’s true.

Buying Drugs on Instagram: It’s easier than you think

Thought Instagram was for showing off selfies or sharing pics of your vacation in order to be the envy of your friends?

Apparently not…it’s now become the ideal place to connect with drug dealers. The word “obvious” is an understatement for how these dealers operate. With usernames like “ihavedrugs4sale” and drug-riddled posts/pictures, these users eagerly flaunt their offerings. The most popular items in their stock usually include marijuana, prescription painkillers, Xanax, molly (mdma), and lean (codeine syrup mixure).

For those struggling with drug addiction, this presents a huge problem. As the Washington Post reports, searching for the hashtags #oxy, #percocet, #painkillers, #painpills, #oxycontin, #adderall, and #painrelief will return a plethora of posts from Instagram users. Those users may be struggling with addiction, partying like it’s nobody’s business, or dealing the hashtagged drugs online.

The problem is Instagram’s algorithms can’t distinguish the context the hashtags are used in. And if a user then follows a dealer using the hashtags, Instagram’s algorithms then suggest that user follow more drug dealers. In the course of one day over 50 Instagram dealer accounts were found simply be searching for different hashtags like #weed4sale.

So how does the process work? It will surprise you, or maybe appall, at how simple it is.

Most dealer profiles have a bunch or “product” photos displaying their inventory and their contact information is in the bio or comments section. While some bravely post their mobile number, most use a messaging app called Kik. No phone numbers or personal info is exchanged here, only user to user messaging.

How are orders fulfilled? It’s as easy as ordering on Amazon. And sometimes faster.

You simply send a message with the product you are interested in purchasing and the dealer responds. Most dealers use wire transfer and can ship out the same day if you send money fast enough.
For what it’s worth, the ability to be connected with drug dealers via social media isn’t a problem unique to Instagram. The same types of posts are widespread on Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Twitter. In recent months Instagram has blocked search results for certain hashtags, such as #fentanyl, #cocaine, and #heroin, all illegal substances. But dealers simply switch to hashtagging their posts with legal drug names, or slightly tweaked the spelling of drug names–and then proceeding to sell both legal and illegal drugs to Instagram users when they connect with them outside of the platform.

Yet still, Instagram’s owner Facebook says it’s aware of the problem and is working to put a stop to the sale of illegal drugs through Instagram, though its initiatives are still in the “early stages.”

As Facebook’s vice president for global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, told the Washington Post:
“We’re not yet sophisticated enough to tease apart every post to see if it’s trying to sell someone illegal drugs or they are taking Xanax [because] they are stressed out. Obviously, there is some stuff that gets through that is totally against our policy, and we’re getting better at it.”