Phan+T.+Focus+Group+Report

Phan T.

TO: Social Networking Team FROM:Truc Phan SUBJECT: Social Networking Focus Group Report DATE: March 29, 2010

This is my focus group report I ran with five female college students on how they feel about hackers and predators on social networking sites. We covered all the questions developed by our team. All the participants were concern about privacy and the threat of hackers and predators.

Social networks are increasingly subject to attacks by hackers and predators. Hackers are now targeting users by sending messages to their social networking sites impersonating their friends, and predators who frequent these sites have been charged with kidnapping, raping, and even murdering young women. Our team wished to determine how these threats affect Gen-Y's use of social networks and whether males and females view these threats differently. Information from these session will allow Proximity clients to promote the safety of their social networking sites when targeting Gen-Y users.
 * Focus Group Rationale**

The focus group took place at my house on March 17, 2010.
 * Setting and Participants**

Sarah, 25, biochemistry graduate student at UMB Ellen, 24, biology graduate from UMBC Victoria, 19, student at Towson Univ, accounting major Emily, 19, student at Towson Univ, art major Jenna, 18, student at CCBC, undeclared major

We covered all 5 questions during our focus group session.
 * Session Topics**

__Concerns about privacy__ All the participants expressed concerns about privacy. Their main concern was an employer or school looking at their profiles and pictures. Sarah said “Since I’m applying to medical school, I don’t want them looking at my profile and making a judgment based on what they see from my personal life.” Jenna even uses an alias on Facebook because she does not want her estranged father to find her. Emily is friends with her mother, grandmother, and some coworkers so she doesn’t want to post anything “inappropriate”.

__Hackers and predators__ None of the participants experienced any virus attacks from any of the social networking sites. Some did receive strange messages and sexual attempts from unknown people. Ellen, Sarah, and Jenna stated that they got a lot of sexual offers from strangers on Myspace, but none from Facebook.

__Privacy settings__ In this part, we discussed how each participant set their settings and how they censor different friends. All the participants only allow strangers to see a profile picture and very basic information such as name, network, and gender. Ellen and Sarah were the most paranoid. Ellen put most of the people on her list on a limited profile. Ellen exclaimed, “I get tag in a lot of pictures so I don’t want everyone seeing them.” Sarah said it was too much work going through her list of friends, so when she makes a photo album, she allows only certain people to see the pictures. Victoria also expressed the same sentiment as Sarah about going through her friends list. Victoria and Jenna hardly put anything on their sites. Emily didn’t know about limiting certain people’s access to her information, but she wanted to change that after the session.

__Using social networking sites as a dating portal__ Sarah is the only one who has used a dating/social networking site, but after a short period she canceled her account. She said that there was no way to limit the information released on these sites and there were too many creepy people who contacted her. The other girls thought it was stupid and were afraid they were going to meet an impostor or rapist.

The session revealed that the female participants
 * Findings**
 * are very concerned about privacy
 * are still vulnerable to hackers because they are opening messages from strangers.
 * are conscientious about not allowing strangers seeing their profile, but they each differ in their ways of differentiating the information within their friends.
 * are not interested in dating online

The females in this session are very private and use social networking sites safely because they do not release information out to everyone. They mainly use social networking to interact with their close friends. Although they take precautions, they are still prone to hackers by opening messages from unknown people. The threat of predators is prevalent amongst these females because it is the main reason they do not use social networking as a dating portal.

These findings may just apply to these particular females, so we need to compare them with our other female sessions. We also want to compare these findings with male sessions to determine whether or not males and females use social networking differently and if their views on privacy differ.