Where is the data about us?

All the information that we put on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and any other social networking site is held on that site by the company that owns the service.

This means that your data is held on servers (computers) and may be backed up to other servers or services, so the social networking service may be holding several copies of our pages. This may be held in several countries around the world. It is technically possible that service staff in charge of maintaining and running the servers used for social networking sites could illegally look for and access pages belonging to specific people if the people are interesting enough. However, given the large volumes of data, it is very unlikely that anyone would just try and browse the content of these servers.

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Security and Privacy for All (SP4A) is a project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) dedicated to increasing public awareness of and engagement with the topic of IT security and privacy. For more information on the SP4A project, click here. To find out more about the project sponsors, click on their logos at the top of the page.

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