I know people who tell me they do not use any social media, well except LinkedIn or maybe Pinterest or Facebook to stay in touch with old friends, I always laugh. Without knowing it, they all seem to use some form of Social Media, even apps like WhatsApp for a group discussion before heading out to dinner or a movie.
Recently 2 giants in the world of Social Media, Twitter and Meta (formerly Facebook) have announced they will begin charging for security features such as MFA/2FA, even in one article as stated the “worst form of authentication” will cost you. This raises a lot of questions in my mind as someone who believes that if you are going to provide a platform, should you not be responsible for the security of it?
With hackers having such a strangle hold on so many people and platforms, you would think it is in their best interest to make them as secure as possible so you don’t delete your profile and the app.
Now lets focus on Social Media, we choose what we want to use, usually based on what our peers use so we can “stay connected”. Companies offer their platform for free and entice you to use it to “stay connected”. See your friends kids birthday party you couldn’t attend, find out a colleague or friend has received a promotion or got a new job, find that perfect match, you know all the important stuff, especially what the latest fashion trends are, dictated by some famous person (real or not)! Ok that last one was a little cheeky, but we do consume a lot of our daily lives through many of these Social Media outlets.
Because they gave us their platform for free for so many years, and are making huge profits from selling ad space, does that give them the right to now, after we are all addicted to them, the right to say, ‘want to be safe pay me’! I think not!
When we look at the world of software there are free and paid for applications, typically they are the ones who have to do security updates and do their best to keep us safe, and should it not be the responsibility of any software to do so, paid for or free? After all nobody made these free Social Media platforms give away their app. They could have made them paid for or subscription based from day one. This is not to say you have no responsibility yourself, if you do not choose to secure your account that is your mistake, but the option should be there and not on a fee based option.
But then how many of us would have used them becomes the real question? Likely we would have become much more picky as to what we downloaded at what cost. Kind of like car shopping, we buy the best car we can afford, but they all come with the very basic safety equipment, you don’t pay extra for airbags as an example.
To this end I must say I find it unconscionable that these 2 companies (for now) have decided to make our life online less secure unless we pay their FEE! When a hacker does it it’s illegal but these 2 platforms are no better asking you to pay for security on what they have developed.
Here are a few articles that I have read on this.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/17/23605073/twitter-blue-charge-sms-2fa
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/meta-verified-facebook-instagram-mark-zuckerberg/