# Risk Perceptions on Social Media Use in Norway
## 6 Summary of Findings and Discussion
### Risk Perceptions of Social Media Use  
When we examined the risk perceptions of social media usage, we started by analysing the risk perceptions of posting various pieces of information on SoMe. The survey design was such that choosing a specific SoMe triggered questions about it. We compared the actions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat. As an aggregated result, we found that the respondents considered Facebook and Twitter to be riskier than Reddit and Snapchat. This results might be due to Twitter being an open platform where everyone can read content unless one has strict privacy settings. However, the information on Facebook is arguably less accessible than Twitter as it has more protection bydefault than Twitter, but the results have these two close together. The risk perceptions of conducting activities on these two services follow each other closely (Table 15), except posting about vacation, which is deemed a somewhat higher risk on Twitter than Facebook. Reddit does not use real names by default and provides a level of anonymity for its users. This feature is likely the reason that it received the lowest overall risk score across all the measured variables except posting pictures and pets with names. Images can contain quite a bit of metadata which can be abused to figure out information about the camera and where the picture was taken (geo-tagging). This information can be used for stalking purposes, and one could figure out if the device that has taken a photo is vulnerable to some exploit, if the model and make are vulnerable. Information also become mostly public once it is posted on the forum. We assume that there are many highly competent IT users on Reddit, and the combination of these issues might be the reason why posting pictures is perceived as risky by the Reddit users. A note on sharing information shared about pets is that it, in some cases, easily can be abused to break security questions. In our comparison, Reddit has the lowest overall risk. Examining Snapchat shows that it is close to Reddit in the overall score. Generally, sharing information on Snapchat is deemed to have a low risk by our participants. However, Snapchat also has the riskiest function, which was Snapmap. Snapchat also provides a level of anonymity on a username level, but using it for sharing pictures severely weakens the anonymity of the service. Snapchat has the lowest risk score for posting pictures, which makes sense as it is primarily a picture sharing service. Snapchat allows for strict control of who gets to see the shared information and, to the user, the data seems to disappear after a brief period. These are likely explanations of why Snapchat is deemed more secure as a whole. However, is there grounds for considering Snapchat as more secure for posting pictures than the other services? There are some further answers in the data to this question: Considering the results in Table 15, each activity is ranked according to the platform on which it is conducted. Table 16 provided the aggregated results of both platforms and activities. Considering the activities, we can induce the information assets and threats for each and propose a threat model, Table 29. For example, if the main concern is stalking or burglary, the Snapmap would be the riskiest service as it reveals the location to potential stalkers and burglars. Expanding on the burglary risk, the secondary asset at risk would be valuables located at the property. Participating in an online debate is considered to be risky by our participants. This activity often reveals the political opinion of the debater, and this information is, in many cases, considered as sensitive personal information. Furthermore, a debater exposes himself/herself to the public, and controversial opinions can have severe consequences if one gets targeted by the mob. Sharing a political opinion is similar to participating in debate, but often with less exposure. Our sample deemed these two activities as equally risky.