Facebook Privacy Changes Continue

The article I read on the recent changes Facebook has made to its privacy settings stated the negative reactions of how people felt. It went in depth to explain how scammers and identity thieves are able to easily access your phone number and personal home address. Hearing this news, many users threatened to boycott Facebook to join another social-networking site and delete their account. Two Senators also joined into the debate as they sent a combined letter to Facebook showing their concerns over the new privacy settings and voiced their opinions so that some changes can be made. To counter these concerns and arguments, Facebook replied back saying that users will be more aware of what will be shown to app developers when they want to play a new game or something else. 

At the moment Facebook users are made aware of privacy changes on the top of their news feed. If there are new privacy changes that are going to be implemented soon, Facebook alerts users usually around a week before on the top on their homepage. Many users ignore this, including me, and move on to do whatever they were doing. I believe Facebook should send users an email to their customers when privacy settings are changed. From my perspective, Facebook should not have the right to share my personal information as it puts me in danger as scammers and other thieves now have easy access to where I live and  can impersonate me. From the perspective of Facebook, they would benefit if they gave access of the personal information of users to developers. Millions of app developers want to develop their app on Facebook and are willing to may lots of money to do so.  

I use my Facebook to interact with my family and friends that are not in Kuwait. I use it to see what my friends are up to and interact with them frequently. Privacy settings do concern me and after reading this article, I have changed mine too. Reading this article was shocking and now I wish to be more aware of what is going on in Facebook and if there is anything else that I need to do. If there are more privacy changes, I will make sure to be aware of what they are and use less apps to play games in order to not give out my personal information. 

If you also wish to read the article I am talking about, check it out here:

The Changes Continue

The Market controls Teens

Who's the boss? The market or the teens? While it may be debatable, I am certain that the market has the edge as to who controls whom. Firstly, manipulative advertisements influence many little kids to ask their parents to spend money on them. Last year, $500 million were spend by parents on kids who were younger than 12. Models and bodybuilders are on TV and posters all over cities and seeing such people influences teens to make them their role models as they do not realize that they are not realistic images. Lastly, I believe when children are young, the market distracts them and which ruins their education.

Here is my presentation on the side I supported:

Teen's Use of Media (Analysis)

In our Media and Marketplace Technology class, we were assigned groups in which we were to discuss and analyze the results of the teen's use of media survey. The group work was divided between us and when we were finished, we came together and discussed what we had done and if anything needed corrections. The feedback we gave to another group was also divided and we learned that our results had many similarities. There weren't many mistakes and so it did not take too long to correct their analysis. The overall results of the survey were that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are very popular among the people who took the survey and that access to advanced technology varies in different countries as the people in Africa don't have as much technology the people in Kuwait.

To view my team's analysis of the survey, click the the link below:
Analyzing the Survey Results

Market controlling teens vs. Teens controlling market

There is a big debate nowadays as to who's really in charge. Is the teens or is it the market? With this topic hotly debated, I strongly believe that the market controls the teens. Here are a couple reasons why I believe so:

1. Firstly, the market decides whats fashionably and "in" in today's world which make teens crazy about their product. 

2. Secondly, advertisements for products are now shown glamorously, mostly over-exagerrated, and are targeted towards easy customers such as ourselves. We believe these ridiculous advertisements with a great deal of publicity in our social circle and then end up buying them. A classic example would be the advert for Redbull where it continuously states that it "gives you wings!". 

3. Lastly, with millions of teens able to access the internet daily, advertisers now target the internet in excess as it is very easy to contact teens anywhere at any time.