If you’re building a website that relies on third-party apps and platforms to run it, you’re compromising your ability to keep both your website and your data intact, as those apps and platforms naturally die over time. Let’s say you invest $5,000 into a website and end up relying on a completely different third-party app to create the community forum. What will you do if that third-party forum app goes away? What will you do if that app is later sold to another business and then the south africa consumer email list pricing or model itself changes? In any of these situations, your digital assets would be completely compromised and out of your control.
It’s not uncommon for even the most popular apps to distance themselves from the third-party apps they use. In fact, Snapchat did exactly this recently. Consequently, this brings us to re-examine how the same rule of data security applies to our business in a variety of ways, such as social media platforms.
Third-party apps aren't the only ones that can die. Think about all the social media platforms that have come and gone. You probably haven't used them all, but for example, everyone used MySpace at some point. And what happened when MySpace went dark? It changed direction to focus on music once again, and when that happened, did you decide to leave it for Facebook? What happened to all your contacts when they decided to slowly migrate elsewhere?
Let’s take a look at some of the concerns about maintaining data integrity, and consider the case of MySpace in the process. After its decline, MySpace “disappeared” user blogs. All of that hard-earned content along with all of the interactions achieved disappeared with the app overnight. This was particularly damaging to users who had not saved their content elsewhere and/or relied on MySpace as their platform. Supposedly, the social media platform pushed this move in an effort to “modernize” its site. However, all of that user history and logs disappeared in the blink of an eye without any warning or opportunity to recover the content.
MySpace and LinkedIn were also targeted by hackers, an attack that compromised the logins of millions of users which in turn compromised their accounts. 427 million MySpace accounts were hacked and 100 million LinkedIn users were targeted, their information being put up for sale to the highest bidder on the black market.
The 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report showed that cybersecurity crimes were one of the biggest threats, costing an estimated $2 trillion by 2019. The fact is that any social media platform is a target. The bigger the platform, the bigger the target. The same goes for those social media platforms that might be targeted for political reasons and/or for their censorship policies. In case they have secured their walls against such attacks, there is still nothing to ensure that the company will not change its practice or business method or even be sold to another company.
