A new national poll conducted for Fortune found Facebook to be the least trusted major tech company when it comes to safeguarding users information in America. Only about 22% of Americans trust Facebook compared to Amazon’s 49%, Google’s 41%, Microsoft’s 40%, and Apple’s 39%.
All of these numbers are pretty bleak, but Facebook’s is particularly low due to a series of privacy breaches that have put them on national news and forced the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify in front of the U.S. Senate. Capturing particular attention was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the first of these blunders, in which the data of 87 million users were improperly accessed and used to influence the 2016 presidential election.
The same poll found Americans to also rank Facebook last in leadership, ethics, trust, and image. In September, Facebook faced another breach that involved improper access of 30 million users’ emails and phone numbers. THey have also gotten in trouble for failing to stop Russian entities from spreading fake news leading up to the 2016 election.
“Facebook is in the bottom in terms of trust in housing your personal data,” said Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema. “Facebook’s crises continue rolling in the news cycle.”
Facebook has updated their privacy policy and hired more team members to fight the spreading of false information across their platform, but the American people don’t seem impressed by these efforts. Fortune also found that 48% people polled to see Facebook more negatively than they did six months ago, while only 17% feel more positively.
7% of respondents said they felt more negatively over the past six months about Microsoft while 28% saw the company in a better light. 10% of respondents felt more negatively about Amazon versus 39% having a more positive view.
Specifically, the population is unforgiving of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The frequency of these scandals indicate that privacy breaches are not anomalies but rather a sign of systemic failure in Zuckerberg’s leadership.
59% of respondents said they were “at least somewhat confident” in Zuckerberg’s leadership in the ethical use of data and privacy information. This figure pales in comparison to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ 77%, Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 72%, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s 71%, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s 68%.
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