Cybercrimes in the Social Media Issues and Challenges

Debasree Debnath
Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur, India

Volume III, Issue IV, 2020

Cybercrimes use the computers, internet, human behaviour and other technology based mediums for the criminal misconduct. In the contemporary era, the technology-based devices help to increase the computer perpetrated crimes in the society; these crimes exist more stringently as it is difficult to apprehend the criminals. It becomes easy for the perpetrators to commit such crimes in today’s era as globalization has gifted us the fastest internet infrastructure facility at very low cost. Social media has become the part and parcel of everyone’s life, irrespective of the age group which is affecting the lives of the individuals, as these people share a lot of their personal and social life in the media through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It becomes a challenge for the intelligence bureau to catch the cyber criminals because, firstly, these criminals use the internet very cleverly commit the crimes and secondly, due to the ongoing technological developments which provides them platform for committing such crimes. These people are using internet as a tool and getting the information which is available in the pool of social media as well as other internet sources for committing the crime which in turn are violating the right to privacy of an individual. The criminals by using the digital communication channel hack the user and company profiles, and then they sell the stolen identities for their illegal gains. The RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center reported that, 43 percent fraud attacks were increased in the 2018 as the cyber criminals are finding new ways to exploit the social media. The researcher in this paper discussed the various ongoing cybercrimes on social media and need to harmonise the legal aspects of cyber security. The researcher also tried to discuss the measures for protection of individual’s rights from social networking sites and how they need to protect their data in the social media platform.

Keywords: Cybercrime, Social Media, Technological Advancement, Cyber Security, Privacy.