#5 How Shutterfly and Other Social Sites Leave Your Kids Vulnerable to Hackers: Summary and Reflection

This article list a few social sharing sites who have millions of users and who care less about using encryption to protect users’ private information. To begin, Shutterfly is a social sharing site that allow users to upload photos, home addresses, gender information, emails, phone numbers, school names, jersey number and school schedules all in one place. Their privacy policy claims the whole site is protected by SSL that keep websites from being hacked into but is not. SSL stands for secure socket layer, which starts with “https” instead of “http”, it provides assurance that the site is legitimate, that the connection to the site has not been modified or hacked, and no one is intercepting the information flowing between the user and the site.

Without SSL, sensitive information can be easily obtain by anyone who is tech savvy, a quick download of a program called Cookie Cadger and a computer with the right equipment. Shutterfly has been aware of this for six months and recommend users not to send or receive sensitive information over unsecured wifi networks as protection. Eteamz another social sharing site catering to youth sports team do not use SSL across its entire website leaving username and password vulnerable and TeamSnap do not use SSL across much of its website.

I am appalled to learn that a lot of social sharing sites that collect personal information on its users does not care about providing privacy. And that Shutterfly’s solution to this problem is for the user not to use public wifi. I feel if people were aware of this, these sites would not boast about how many users they have because they would not have as many. Likewise, I feel when you have sensitive information, it will be ethical to do everything you can to secure it. As a future educator, I am happy I read this article and I will make sure that I use sites that start with "https".