A series of surveys were recently conducted by MyLife, a privacy management tool, asking people how much they trust different entities with their personal information. Each survey received 1000 responses, and asked the individuals a simple question, “Do or would you trust XXX with your information?” The XXX was the name of the organization in question. Specifically, they inquired about Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and the US Government.
The results of the survey were as follows:
- Facebook – 82.9% do not trust Facebook vs. 17.1% saying they do trust the social media giant.
- US Government – 76.8% of respondents do not trust the US government with their information compared with 23.2% of people who do.
- LinkedIn – 67.1% of people do not trust LinkedIn vs. 32.9% of people who do.
- Google – 52.8% of people do not trust Google, and 47.2% do.
While Google is clearly scoring far higher than Facebook, it is interesting that none of these entities were able to break the 50% mark. Whether this is due to the general lack of trust by individuals and businesses, or something that the government and these organizations are doing wrong is not quite so clear.
Given the extremely bad reputation the US Government currently has with people from all political parties, however, it has to be a little discouraging for Facebook to see these results. It seems likely, from my point of view anyway, that Facebook scored so low more because people are constantly interacting with this site. In contrast, most people seem to be generally ignorant of what the US government is doing and saying, unless it is during an election year.
Whatever the case, there is obviously major room for improvement when it comes to trust. The big question remains, however, how can they gain our trust?
You can see the exact results of the survey HERE.
