Trust of US Facebook users dips below 50%

Doubt it will obey privacy laws

FEWER than half of Americans trust Facebook to obey US privacy laws, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday, illustrating the challenge facing the social media network after a scandal over its handling of personal information.

The poll, taken from Wednesday to Friday, also found that fewer Americans trust Facebook than other tech companies that gather user data, such as Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Some 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66 percent who said they trust Amazon, 62 percent who trust Google, 60 percent for Microsoft and 47 percent for Yahoo.

The poll was conducted online in English throughout the US. 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 percent last week, while the hashtag #DeleteFacebook gained traction online and the company’s chief executive, 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 said 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 (R475.12bn) in revenue last year from advertising.

Many people take a dim view of those “targeted” advertisements. Some 63 percent said they would like to see “less targeted advertising” in the future, while 9 percent said they wanted more. When asked to compare them with traditional forms of advertising, 41 percent said targeted ads were “worse”, while 21 percent said they were “better”.

“They make a lot of assumptions that are not true,” a poll respondent said in a follow-up interview. – Reuters