Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

 
 
Chapter 2: Literature review 
2.1
 
Preamble 
The previous chapter has clarified about the issue of social media privacy and 
security. It has also given the motivation as to why this research was required, by 
highlighting the problems currently being faced and the existing solutions. The limitations of 
this research have also been highlighted. The boundaries of the research have been defined 
and its goals, clearly stated. In this chapter, the research will look at the previously conducted 
studies on the same and identify the problems they sought to research, the type of research 
they did, the results they found, and the recommendations they gave. The social media 
privacy issue sprung up in the last ten years when social media sites were being developed 
and introduced to the public. 
It is important to note that in their early stages, most social media platforms that exist 
today were not monetized. The developers had only been focusing on how to build the 
platforms and get more users. Some of these platforms were actually against any ideas of 
monetizing their platforms. However, within the last ten years, the contrast happened. Most 
of the social media platforms had gotten a significant number of users, mostly in the range of 
half a billion users. They, therefore, saw it viable to monetize the platforms and this is when 
trouble started brewing (Robertson, 2018). They started collecting user information just to 
profile it for advertising purposes (Robertson, 2018). Even worse, at times, this data was sold 
to third parties. Another problem also came up. Attackers started fetching information about 

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users on social media and using it to exploit them. Researchers then started focusing on the 
issue of user privacy and security on social media platforms. A number of researches have 
been conducted on it, and they have unearthed a lot of problems and given their presumed 
solutions to this problem. This research honors the works done by four researchers that have 
looked into the issue of social media privacy from interesting perspectives. As a foundation 
to what has already been done on the topic, it will discuss, in depth, these researches, how 
they viewed the topic, the type of study they did, the results they arrived at, and the solutions 
that they gave.