Brief 4: Chosen Newspaper Article- Facebook lifts its sharing restrictions

I have been through my two news papers that I brought on tuesday and I have found an article that I am interested in and I think will be and interesting subject to look into. I have found this article about privacy settings on social networks and who is actually looking at your information/ pictures ect. I think this is going to be something interesting to look into and relevant for my age range. I am thinking of starting a survey with my class and flat mates to find out what are the most popular social networks and whether they actually know what there privacy settings on Facebook are.

Here I have read through the story and picked out the bits that I find interesting and the way that it is written. I have noticed that it is very patronising story and it is written by and older man that talks like all teenagers are stupid and careless. There is also a lot of statistics in this article which I like as it seems to put things into perspective. It is a very opinionated article by analysts and higher education people. 

To kickstart my research I thought I would do abit of primary research first to find out if people really are as clueless about there privacy settings as they making out, also to find out how many people have Facebook's rivals. I went round the graphics class and asked 25 people what social networks they are on, the feedback was interesting as i found out that 5 people don't even have Facebook or any social media because they find it pointless, however others have all social networks and were listing off others that they have. 

 Here I created a pie chart of the primary research that I have gathered. This is a useful indication of which is most popular, I think Facebook should be worried as there are a lot of rivals that have a lot of teenagers on them also. Twitter is one of Facebook biggest rivals. However all of these social networks are used for different purposes. 

Here I put my other question in a pie chart, again I think this was useful, as it proves that more people do know there privacy settings on Facebook. 

I have began some secondary research looking into other social networks and how they differ from Facebook.

Instagram- Online photosharing, video sharing and social networking service that enables users to take pictures and videos applying digital filters to them and share them with more networking services

Twitter- An online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read 'tweets' which are text messages limited to 140 characters, aslso you are able to follow a lot of celebrities on twitter. 

Snapchat- Photo messaging application developed by Stanford University Students. You can send photo's and video's to all friends and they can only be opened for a certain amount of time.

Whatsapp- Messenger across majority of smart photos. In addition to text messaging, users can send each other images, video and audio media messages. 

Also I have looked into how people can stay safe online buy just doing simple things. Passwords are an easy way to stay safe online, by simply having different passwords for different accounts you can stay safer. Simple things like don't give your bank details out to websites that don't have the secure sign at the top of the web browser.