Abstract:

Social media services such as blogs, forums and the most popular online social platforms (most used In Romania being Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, SnapChat, with a huge number of users) can be accessed from both traditional computers (desktop, laptop) and mobile devices. The number of Internet users accessing Social Media content from their mobile devices is continuously growing, already exceeding those using traditional IT systems.

Moreover, social media services are being used in all the activities including educational services. Therefore, through social media we can access training programs, enroll in a variety of courses, watch numerous tutorials, practically we can train and perform ourselves.
For enrolling to these kind of training systems, we send numerous personal data to the education services provider for our identification. In the context of the multitude of cyber attacks, many of them leading to identity theft, we are wondering and concerning about how can we protect these data, and in the same time, to use the social-media services for our training.

In this context, the protection of personal data and privacy have an important role in social media, both from the perspective of users who have personal accounts and want to keep their privacy in cyberspace, and from those who are interested in collecting data for activities such as targeted avdertising or business intelligence.

From this point of view, most of the websites using social media services offer their users the options for data security, with which they can restrict access to personal or public data. This type of data can be viewed and indexed by socialized services to create online user’s profile and to offer personalized messages or deals.

Regarding the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC), starting with 25th of May 2018, it is important to understand how the social media services use our personal data to know our preferences and to create our profile.

This paper proposes to present a series of methods through which the user enrolled in different training programs can request the protection of his personal data and how these data must be secured by educational online services in conformity with European Regulations, in order to eliminate profiling and protect the privacy of users.

Keywords:

Social media platform, General Data Protection Regulation, privacy protection, educational services.