Article in the Daily Mail
Victoria Woollaston reports in The Daily Mail on September 18, 2013 that there have been claims that Facebook recently lost 11 million users in the US and UK.
Facebook users are quitting the social network in droves due to privacy concerns and fear of internet addiction, according to new research.
Increasing numbers are taking part in what’s been dubbed ‘virtual identity suicide’ and deleting their accounts.
Analysis of more than 600 people, by researchers from the University of Vienna, found that data protection issues and social pressure to add friends were also among the reasons for leaving.
Others quoted shallow conversations, general dissatisfaction and loss of interest in the site.
Compared to the sample of those who continued to use Facebook, the quitters were older, on average, and more likely to be male.
Reasons for quitting Facebook were mainly privacy concerns (48.3 per cent), followed by a general dissatisfaction (13.5 per cent), negative aspects of online friends (12.6 per cent) and the feeling of getting addicted (6.0 per cent).
Brenda Wiederhold, editor of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking which published the findings, said: “Given high profile stories such as WikiLeaks and the recent NSA surveillance reports, individual citizens are becoming increasingly more wary of cyber-related privacy concerns.
Read entire article on the Daily Mail Online
Comments are closed.