Americans Less Likely To Trust Facebook than Rivals on Personal Data (reuters.com)

Opinion polls published on Sunday in the United States and Germany cast doubt over the level of trust people have in Facebook over privacy, as the firm ran advertisements in British and U.S. newspapers apologizing to users. From a report: Fewer than half of Americans trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, while a survey published by Bild am Sonntag, Germany's largest-selling Sunday paper, found 60 percent of Germans fear that Facebook and other social networks are having a negative impact on democracy [...] The Reuters/Ipsos online poll found that 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66 percent who said they trust Amazon.com, 62 percent who trust Alphabet's Google, 60 percent for Microsoft Corp..

Comments

Don't trust any of them

[Geoffrey.landis]

Probably a mistake. you really shouldn't trust any of them.

Re:Don't trust any of them

[Oswald McWeany]

Probably a mistake. you really shouldn't trust any of them.

True, the only thing that makes Facebook worse is probably that they are bigger than the others. They have more data and probably more business connections to sell it to.

No one should ever use their real name on a social media account. Nor should they allow access to contacts, and other invasive permissions or give a social media company their phone number. Even better is not to sign up in the first place.

Re:Don't trust any of them

[Opportunist]

A comparative does not imply a positive. Saying that I trust A less than B does not imply that I trust B. It can well be that I trust A even less than B.

If you're doing better, you're usually not exactly doing well.

Re:Don't trust any of them

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Well, gosh darn it if they haven't just proven the availability heuristic yet again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

To follow the law? Yes. The law to protect me? No.

[argumentsockpuppet]

Breaking the law is bad business and it typically ends up costing more in lawyers and fines than following it would. That's kind of the point.

But who thinks the laws protect their private data? You click EULAs with these companies agreeing that they can do what they want and that you can't sue them for it. The laws protect the companies, if they didn't, they'd get new laws.

I hope nobody is wondering why

[Opportunist]

After years of changing privacy settings unannounced, flipping privacy switches silently, burying information about it in gigabytes of legalese, putting up smokes and mirrors whenever someone tried to find out just how much FB knows about them and even outright lying about accounts being deleted, and being generally opaque when it comes to what information they store about you, how and in what context, I hope that nobody is wondering why nobody trusts them.

Not that anyone else that's in the data collection business is any more trustworthy, mind you, but FB pretty much went out of their way to flaunt how they pwn your data and how you can't do jack shit about it.