Facebook has been struggling with privacy issues over the last year and the latest survey informed that even half of users from the United States adjusted their privacy settings over such period.
According to a survey, prepared by the Pew Research Center, with the results found here, number of Facebook users have shown changes in their interaction with the popular website in a year. As reported, 4,594 U.S. adults have been polled between May 29th and June 11th while 54% admitted any change in their privacy settings.
Moreover, 42% of the users informed that they had stopped using the platform for some time (at least couple of weeks) and even 26% of them have deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the same period. When considering all these users, 74% of those polled had taken at least one of the above-mentioned actions over the last year, albeit there is still no relation between the issue of Facebook related to privacy.
There is also a generation difference confirmed by the statistics. It’s interesting to find that the younger generation reflected these issues more, when 44% of young Facebook users (18-29 years) confirmed that their app has been deleted on their phone, while the older generation saw only 12% of users doing the same (65+ years). Furthermore, the same applied to the change in privacy settings, when even 64% of younger group (18-49 years) has taken the action, while only 33% of 65+ users did the same.
As for the political orientation, Pew was unable to find any significant difference between Democrats and Republicans. Although number of social network platforms, including Facebook, have been accused of supporting liberal groups, there was no difference found between the supporters of Republican and Democratic parties in any of the categories.
The main reason for these privacy issues of Facebook was the Cambridge Analytica scandal when it was revealed that Facebook has gained information about 87 million Facebook users, not providing the company consent thereto. Therefore, Facebook and its privacy policies became the main focus of investigation. For this purpose, Facebook has to implement number of changes so its users could have better control over their data. This included also the possibility to download the data Facebook has already collected about them.
According to Pew, only 9% of polled had downloaded their data since this possibility was allowed to them, albeit acting more carefully when it comes to app. From the group of this 9%, we can see only (roughly) half of the with a deleted app on their phone, while 79% changed their privacy settings over the last 12 months.
