Americans less likely to trust Facebook than rivals that gather personal data
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO: Fewer than half of Americans trust Facebook to obey US privacy laws, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, illustrating the challenge facing the social media network after a scandal over its handling of personal information.
The poll, taken Wednesday through Friday, also found that fewer Americans trust Facebook than other tech companies that gather user data, such as Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp and Yahoo.
Some 41 per cent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66 per cent who said they trust Amazon, 62 per cent who trust Google, 60 per cent for Microsoft and 47 per cent for Yahoo.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 2,237 people and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points.
Facebook, the world’s largest social media firm, has been offering apologies as it tries to repair its reputation among users, advertisers, lawmakers and investors for mistakes that let 50 million users’ data get into the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook shares tumbled 14 per cent last week, while the hashtag #DeleteFacebook gained traction online and the company’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, faced demands that he appear before US lawmakers to testify in a hearing.
Zuckerberg and Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said last week that shoring up trust was their priority. “We know this is an issue of trust. We know this is a critical moment for our company,” Sandberg told CNBC on Thursday.
It is too early to say if distrust will cause people to step back from Facebook, eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson said. Customers of banks or other industries do not necessarily quit after losing faith, she said.
“It’s psychologically harder to let go of a platform like Facebook that’s become pretty well ingrained into people’s lives,” she said. One reason that Facebook and other internet companies collect personal information from users is to deliver advertisements for products and services to people who are most likely to want them.
Facebook, with more than 2 billion monthly active users, made almost all its $40.6 billion in revenue last year from advertising.
The poll found that many people take a dim view of those “targeted” advertisements.
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