In this day and age, it is very common place for people to be active on social media.

In fact, according to statistics from early on in 2018, it is believed that 3.196 billion of us around the globe are active on social media.

Although the majority of the main and most popular social media platforms are free to use, there are other prices to pay that so few of us pay any attention too.

We are talking about our personal data.

Whenever we log on to a social media platform we are sharing aspects of our privacy and our personal data; from our email addresses, dates of births, physical addresses and even our phone numbers.

This has always been common practice and gone widely unnoticed until it emerged that 87 million Facebook user’s data was shared with Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm used by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. The information was shared without users' knowledge.

This has recently damaged the credibility of Mark Zuckerberg; the CEO of Facebook and of course Instagram.

The inability of Facebook to protect the data and privacy of its users has led to lawmakers to seek to introduce laws and other regulations to ensure that no further data breaches happen; and not just from Facebook, but from all the social media giants and any newcomers that emerge over the coming years.

It is fair to say that social media platforms must work hard to secure the data of its users and to ensure that any data shared online with these platforms are never leaked outside of the corporations we have decided to trust.