Data mining of security threats in social media and websites

In today’s online society, social media contains information to be connected with other people, to express themselves to a bigger audience or to gain all kind of relevant information from other users. Thereby, all these activities produce data, that is collected by the service providers. It is often not clear and it contain false information, noisy, unwanted information This is a big threat to the people. We don’t know in what extent a service provider makes use of this data. On the one hand, personal data collections can serve a useful and necessary purpose, such as the improvement of the user experience or the facilitation of core functionality of the service. It can give also the opportunity for new businesses and research fields to emerge. On the other hand personal data collections has led to a widely applied practice of data analysis and personal information trading, which can highly compromise the users’ privacy and lead to many further problems. In face of these contradictions, this course deals with the implications for the society from personal data collections. Therefore the main subjects are the discussion of business models based on personal data common practices to analyse personal data collections and alternatives to the current data driven social media landscape.