The research firm Creative Strategies has conducted a new survey that gauges the impact of the recent privacy scandal among Facebook users in the United States. This study was conducted by surveying a panel of 1000 Americans, which the research group noted is representative of the general population of the United States in terms of gender and age. The research firm discovered that at least 9 percent of the survey respondents have already deleted their Facebook accounts in response to increased privacy concerns. Moreover, the survey also revealed that 17 percent of users have deleted the Facebook app from their smartphones while another 11 percent have uninstalled the application of the social media platform from other devices.
Even though only a relatively small percentage of people have deleted their Facebook accounts, the research firm noted that the changes in the way Facebook users behave on the social media platform should be more concerning for the tech giant. For example, around 39 percent of the survey respondents mentioned that they will be more careful with what they post and react to on the social media platform. On the other hand, 35 percent of the respondents mentioned that they will access Facebook less frequently while another 31 percent of users surveyed stated that they have changed their settings in an effort to reduce the amount of data that the social network could gather from them. The research firm noted that the changes in the behavior of users could negatively impact the business of the social media platform since Facebook relies primarily on user engagement in order to improve the value that it offers to advertisers.
The social media giant has already taken steps in order to win the trust of its users. Late last month, Facebook has limited the ability of advertisers to leverage the data gathered by the social media platform by discontinuing the Partner Categories program. In addition, the company has started offering monetary rewards to people who report organizations that abuse user data and it has also recently banned a number of data harvesters. The tech firm’s CEO has also repeatedly apologized for the issue. Nonetheless, the survey shows that Facebook users primarily ask the social media platform to be more transparent with regards to how the information is being shared while also providing consumers with the ability to control which data is being shared by the tech firm.
