It was announced this week that lessons in internet safety will be taught in schools from 2011.

Facebook has an age limit of 13 – but with much younger users flouting the rules and cases of teenagers posting their mobile phone numbers online, there have long been calls to make the site’s security measures more robust.

And Facebook itself seems to have woken up to the fact that to reduce bad press for its security measures, it must review those often complicated settings. Which is probably what prompted the recent open letter to members from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In it, he acknowledges that when Facebook was first developed, it was used primarily by students who wanted to share content with other students in their online university network.

Facebook then grew and began to include networks for companies, regions and even full countries, with users perhaps not realising that anyone in the same network (eg Wales) could see your profile, even if you were not ‘friends’. With almost 50% of Facebook users belonging to a network, the social networking site now acknowledges that “this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.”

Zuckerberg goes on: “The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.”
Even more exciting is the fact that you’ll now be able to control who will be able to see each piece of content you upload to the site, making it simple to control what goes into the public domain.

So, not everyone has to know about what you got up to at the office Christmas party, and your dignity - and perhaps your safety - could remain intact.

- Katie Chappelle, digital media manager

There was a time when the only champions fighting for consumers were the Trading Standards Association or BBC Watchdog, but the rise of the internet has allowed an increasing number of individuals to don the gloves and come out fighting.

Consumers with a gripe are no longer limited to sending off an angry letter, fruitlessly visiting a customer services desk or ringing a ‘helpline’ where nobody can actually assist them.

Instead, an increasing number of individuals are choosing to blog about their frustration, rant on Twitter, air their grievances on a forum, link up with others on social networking sites or take on corporations single handed via a range of online outlets.

Networking sites, such as Facebook, offer the perfect opportunity to ‘meet’ other individuals who share a similar interest and create groups to discuss music, television programmes, or an enemy in common.

Easyjet found this to their detriment after a group of passengers became stranded in Corfu earlier this year and a law student on board created Facebook group to take legal action against the airline. To date the group has over 80 members and resulting news coverage has been seen throughout the world. The passengers’ fight to receive an acceptable level of compensation continues, but whatever the resulting payout may be it is likely to cost less for the company than the damage to its reputation in the process.

American Airlines found themselves heavily paying the price after incurring the online wrath of customer Dave Caroll who aired his homemade video complaint on Youtube.

The ‘song and dance’ over a broken guitar could easily have been settled for a couple of hundred dollars, but after the video received over 5million views in just two months and negative publicity followed the company’s share prices plummeted. Dave Carroll’s catchy revenge track reportedly lost American Airlines 10per cent of their share value - a staggering $180million. That could have bought a lot of guitars!

An increasing number of consumers are not only using ‘mashup’ sites like Tripadvisor to feedback about their holiday and hotel experiences, but also to research before they book. According to the 2009 annual Thomson and First Choice trends report half of holidaymakers surveyed use reviews for insight into their holiday or hotel destination, with 80 per cent of them mostly trusting the feedback that they read.

The rise of user generated content websites has satisfied an increased interest in ‘peer to peer’ recommendations which are often trusted more than the websites of the companies and information they have released themselves.

Whilst negative feedback on review sites may initially harm the reputation of a company and potentially dissuade a customer from making a booking, they do at least offer the opportunity to post a response if they wish to. Others may only be able to watch as their rating and share prices fall back down to earth with a bump.

- Victoria Whittal-Williams, Account Executive