Majority of Facebook users remain loyal despite privacy scandal
new york — Most of Facebook’s US users have remained loyal to the social network despite revelations that a political consultancy collected information about millions of accounts without owners’ permission, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday showed.
Facebook has faced pressure from regulators, privacy advocates and shareholders since it said in March that political consultant Cambridge Analytica wrongly obtained personal data through a quiz app connected to Facebook. US lawmakers grilled Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg for two days on the matter.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll adds to other indications that Facebook has so far suffered no ill effects from the episode, other than a public relations headache. The national online poll, conducted April 2630, found that about half of Facebook’s American users said they had not recently changed the amount that they used the site, and another quarter said they were using it more.
The remaining quarter said that they were using it less recently, had stopped using it or deleted their account. That means that the people using Facebook less were roughly balanced by those using it more, with no clear net loss or gain in use. Among all adults, 64 per cent said they use Facebook at least once a day, down slightly from 68 per cent who said so in a similar poll in late March, shortly after news organisations reported Cambridge Analytica’s activity.
Facebook declined to comment. Its executives have apologised for the data-harvesting, pledged to investigate others who collected Facebook user data and reduced the amount of data available to similar app developers now.
In its first quarter results, however, Facebook said the number of monthly users in the United States and Canada rose to 241 million on March 31 from 239 million on December 31, growth that was roughly in line with recent years.