Legal frameworks governing social data analytics and privacy concerns among social media users. (c2019)

Abstract

Big data is a relatively new concept that refers to the enormous amount of data generated in a new era where people are selling, buying, paying dues, managing their health and communicating over the internet. It becomes natural that generated data will be analyzed for the purposes of smart advertising and social statistical studies. Social data analytics is the concept of micro-studying users interactions through data obtained often from social networking services, the concept also known as “social mining” offers tremendous opportunities to support decision making through recommendation systems widely used by e-commerce mainly. With these new opportunities comes the problematic of social media users privacy concerns as protecting personal information over the internet has become a controversial issue among social network providers and users. In this study we identify and describe various privacy concerns and related platforms as well as the legal frameworks governing the protection of personal information in different jurisdictions. Furthermore we discuss the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Ltd incident as an example.