Facebook isn't dying. It's just changing

A global map of interactions between Facebook users created in 2010..what about 2015? Almost everywhere.

Reports of Facebook's death are greatly exaggerated, says Rhiannon Williams. We just prefer to stalk over sharing

By Rhiannon Williams

Every few months, a report is published suggesting Facebook is in decline. A notable study from researchers at Princeton University published earlier this year declared the social network would lose 80 per cent of its users and die out “like the bubonic plague”. Another from YouGov branded Facebook and rival Twitter's popularity in decline in June, stating a lack of interest, concerns over privacy and advertising fatigue among the key reasons.

Yet for all this doom-mongering, are any fewer of us using Zuckerberg's decade-old platform? GlobalWebIndex has published a comprehensive report on social media use across 32 global markets, encompassing some 170,000 internet users in the largest on-going study into the life of the digital consumer.

Facebook was the only network to see a drop in active usage among its 16-24 year-old users, of 0.5 per cent. Since the start of 2013, sharing photos and messaging friends has fallen by around 20 per cent, according to the report. While more than four fifths (83 per cent) of online adults have Facebook accounts, only 47 per cent consider themselves active users, a decrease of around 100 million users between the beginning and end of 2014.

As it stands, this doesn't look great for Facebook. While it may have more global members (some 867 million), YouTube receives more traffic, with 85 per cent of online adults outside of China regularly visiting the site. YouTube's membership numbers may be lower at 656 million, but it beats Facebook's 76 per cent rate of regular visitation by a comfortable margin.

What this suggests is that users are flocking to YouTube with a specific purpose in mind (to watch funny, educational or just plain weird videos), while Facebook is having difficulty encouraging the users it does have to actively use the platform.

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How hackers took over my computer

Online threat: hacking has become more commonplace. Photo: PHOTOLIBRARY.COM

By Sophie Curtis

Whether you're a nation or a citizen, cyber security is an ever-growing issue – new hacks or data breaches emerge daily, in which people's information is exposed or leaked, from bank details to intimate photographs. But is the threat of being hacked something that you or I really need to worry about? And if someone did hack into your computer, what would they be able to do with the information they found?

Over the summer I decided to put these questions to the test. I got in touch with an 'ethical hacker' called John Yeo, who works for cyber security firm Trustwave, and asked him to try and hack me.

The job of an ethical hacker is to do 'penetration testing' for companies. This means they adopt the role of a real hacker and use the same tools that real hackers use to try and break into a company's computer systems, to identify vulnerabilities. The ethical hacker then tells the company what they have found, so that it can fix the vulnerabilities before a real hacker discovers and exploits them.

Hacking an individual is quite a different matter, and John warned me that the attempt may be unsuccessful. Apart from anything else, I knew that it was coming, so would inevitably be more cautious than usual about opening suspicious emails. He also explained that most hackers would 'spread their bets' and target large numbers of people in one go, rather than just one, to increase their chances of success. However, he said he would give it a go.

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