Less than half of Americans trust Facebook under US privacy laws, after a Reuters / Ipsos poll released today illustrating the challenge faced by the social media network following the personal information scandal.
The survey, conducted from Wednesday to Friday, also found that fewer Americans trust Facebook than other technology companies that collect user data, such as Apple Inc., Google Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp, and Yahoo.
About 41% of Americans trust Facebook in how it handles laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66% who said they trust Amazon, 62% who trust Google, 60% of Microsoft and the 47% of Yahoo.
The Reuters / Ipsos survey was conducted online in English throughout the United States. He collected the answers from 2.237 people and has a credibility range, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points.
Facebook, the largest social media company in the world, has publicly apologized in an effort to safeguard its reputation among users, advertisers, lawmakers and investors. Shares of Facebook plummeted 14% last week as the hashtag #DeleteFacebook is making waves and the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has asked to appear as soon as possible as a witness at a hearing by US lawmakers.
Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week that retention was their top priority. "We know this is a trust issue - we know this is a critical time for our company," Sandberg told CNBC Thursday.
It's too early to say whether distrust will cause people to step back from Facebook, eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson said. Customers from banks or other industries don't necessarily quit after losing trust.
“It is psychologically more difficult to let go of a platform like Facebook that has become quite well ingrained in people's lives,” he said.
One of the reasons why Facebook and other Internet companies collect personal information from users is to provide advertising of products and services to people in a more targeted manner.
Facebook, with over 2 billion monthly active users, made nearly all of its $ 40,6 billion in revenue last year from advertising.
The survey found that many people are unaware of those "targeted" advertisements.
About 63% said they would like to see "less targeted advertising" in the future, while 9% said they would like more. When asked to compare them to traditional forms of advertising, 41% said targeted ads were "worse" while 21% said they were "better".
"I think they make a lot of assumptions that aren't true," Maria Curran, 56, who lives near Manchester, New Hampshire, said in an interview.
“It's like I'm showing an interest in healthy eating, all of a sudden all the ads are about weight control and exercise and how to lose weight. I'm just inundated, ”he said.
Curran said he knows that the online retailer Amazon.com also collects his information for targeted marketing, but that is less annoying because it is a shopping site, not a place for personal conversations.
Another interviewee, Kamaal Greene, 26, said he likes targeted ads better than traditional ads because they provide a service, guiding him to the products he wants.
“A while ago I was looking for a special type of glove for my job,” said Greene, a Detroit firefighter.
“I put it in my Amazon cart and forgot about it, then later the ad appeared on Facebook. It reminded me and I clicked and bought it.
A plurality of adults said they would like the government to take a more important role in overseeing the industry's handling of user information. According to the survey, 46% of adults said they wanted more government regulations, while 17% said they wanted less. Another 20 percent said they didn't want any changes, and the remaining 18 percent said they didn't know what to say.