As in other socioeconomic spheres, social networks and media are veritable tools for education as they provide easy channels
for information and knowledge exchange and their trendy nature make them very attractive and portable among the young
and old. However, these applications are fraught with security challenges ranging from surveillance to invasion of privacy
and unwarranted tampering with user data regardless of the seemingly impressive underlying rights of users as claimed by
the vendors as to user accounts. Various vulnerabilities are reported daily as well as data leaks. There appears to be no end
to these unwarranted infringement on rights of users. Sadly, majority of the popular social networking platforms irrespective
of their modus operandi are guilty of this silent crime. Users of such applications are often carried away with flashy features
without paying reasonable attention to the security and privacy of their data. In many cases users appear to have relinquished
their privacy rights to these platforms owing to the fact that many users who suffer data breaches are either ignorant of such
or may not have the wherewithal to challenge the vendors through legal actions. Interestingly a large chunk of users are
unaware of their fundamental rights on such platforms. This paper underscores the relevance of social networks and social
media in tertiary education vis-à-vis the popularly used social networks and advocates for the evolution and institutionalizing
of specific tertiary education social network (TESN) that captures the unique demands of students and lecturers. The rapid
application development paradigm is used to demonstrate a prototype of a TESN that ensures privacy and security of user
data. It is concluded that this application presents a comparative performance while offering institutional data protection,
privacy and security of user data.