By: Gillian Follett ’22
Ghufran Salih ’20 was excited to move to California to begin her career in IT after graduating from the iSchool at Syracuse University in May 2020. However, making this pivotal transition in her life during the COVID-19 pandemic heaped an incredible amount of stress onto her, in addition to the anxiety she already felt from getting adjusted to an unfamiliar place and a new job.
“I wasn’t mentally prepared for as much isolation as I felt,” she said. “I was in this new space in this new city, and I was just nervous and sad all the time.”
Fortunately, Salih discovered a (somewhat unconventional) way to distract herself from her anxieties: starting a TikTok account that focuses on educating people about data privacy and security.
On this week’s episode of Behind the Monitor, we spoke with Salih about the unexpected growth of her TikTok account and how her experience with making videos on the platform has helped her cope with the stress and uncertainty she has felt in the face of the pandemic.
For the past two months, Salih has worked as a product manager in the digital marketing and e-commerce department at Thermo Fisher Scientific, a company that sells software and lab equipment to different areas of the science and healthcare industries. One of Salih’s primary responsibilities in this role is to ensure the personal data of the website’s visitors remains private and secure, which is an area of IT she is incredibly passionate about.
In early August, Salih realized she was tired of idly sitting around in her room when she wasn’t at work and decided to share her knowledge of data privacy policies and online safety practices through TikTok videos. At first, she only had about 25 followers, who were friends she knew outside of the Internet. One “fateful” Sunday night, a video she posted that discussed different ways people can protect their personal information online started to rack up hundreds of thousands of views—a level of success that completely stunned Salih.
“I’ve discovered it’s very niche,” she said. “There are a lot of creators that focus on data, but none that really focused on data privacy and cybersecurity while you’re a consumer online. And so I guess that’s where I found my market.”
After the surge of views on that video, Salih’s account, @ghufransalih, steadily grew in popularity. She currently has 62,000 followers, and her most popular video has been viewed over 790,000 times. Salih’s videos cover a variety of data-related topics, including companies’ terms and conditions statements and privacy policies; two-factor authentication; and password management systems.
Salih said the sense of community she has gained through her TikTok over the past two months has helped ease the loneliness and isolation that drove her to create the account in the first place. She has spoken with other professionals in the data privacy and cybersecurity fields in the comment section of some of her videos, who give her tips about topics she could cover in the future or thank her for sharing her content. Salih also does live video sessions on her account during which she discusses different data security issues and leads viewers through different activities, which has given her the opportunity to chat with people interested in studying data security in college.
Although she never anticipated her TikTok account’s rapid growth in popularity, Salih is grateful that—despite the challenges she has faced due to the pandemic—she has been able to pursue her passion for data privacy and cybersecurity in both her career and in her personal life.
“The pandemic is hard—there are so many reasons why—but I’m very thankful to be healthy and to still be able to do something I love every day,” she said.
To get in touch with Salih, you can add her on LinkedIn or follow her Twitter (@virtualghufran). You also can learn more about personal data security on her TikTok (@ghufransalih).