A Comprehensive Review of Data Privacy Challenges in Social Media Platforms

Social media privacy has become one of the most urgent 21st-century digital concerns, as sites frame communication, identity, and public discourse while also facilitating surveillance, profiling, and exploitation. This review examines twenty peer-reviewed articles from 2003 to 2024, drawn from IEEE, Springer, ACM, and Scopus. The research was grouped into four broad categories: user behavior and awareness, legal and regulatory environment, risks and threats, and privacy enhancing technologies. The findings suggest that while technical solutions (e.g., encryption, differential privacy, federated learning) and policy tools (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, DPDP) are changing, they are not aligned with user understanding, cultural environments, and platform incentives. User literacy deficits, ineffective regulation, and data monetization-based business models remain eroding privacy protections. The review underscores the imperative for interdisciplinary approaches that merge legal, technical, and social insights, ensuring privacy-by-design systems that are easy to use and culturally sensitive.