Online community projects in Lithuania: cyber security perspective

Within the context of smart and inclusive society cyber security is an important issue, which must be analyzed and discussed in the field of science and practice. Collective intelligence, which emerges in the activities of online communities, is a new quality of civil engagement that grants more effective decisions and compliance with societal needs. Various social technologies created possibilities for society members to communicate despite the limitations of the physical world but they have brought high prospects for sophisticated crimes and other violations of rights and obligations of users, administrators and states as regulatory bodies. This article connects several independent fields of research: analytics, social technologies, civil engagement, collective intelligence and cyber security in order to reveal the main threats of using social technologies during the process of engaging society into socially responsible activities. The sources of data are growing and data mining could be used in variety of ways. Analytics allow to combine different observations in order to see new patterns. Risks related to personal data processing in the virtual community networks are discussed together with analysis of related EU legal regulations on personal data protection. The authors stress importance of personal data protection in online networks and legal problems that arise in networked society. As a result, the main trends were identified in the context of online community projects in Lithuania based on quantitative public opinion survey conducted in 2013.