Over Half of Social Media Users Feel That Their Privacy is At Risk

By this point it is clear that social media companies generally don’t seem to have your best interests at heart when it comes to the privacy of your information with all things having been considered and taken into account. This is impacting the decisions that consumers make regarding whether or not they want to make social media platforms central components of their day to day lives, and a recent survey has detailed the evaporation of consumer trust when it comes to social media companies and the like.

This survey was conducted by a digital trust service by the name of Callsign, and one thing that it unveiled was the fact that 54% of social media users don’t really trust the platforms that they are using. Consumers are wary about social media because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up putting their privacy and personal information at risk, and the trust issues don’t just end there either but spread to a lot of other areas.

For example, 51% of consumers felt that mobile networks couldn’t be trusted either when it came to securing their data, and 45% even felt that banks were not up to the mark from a privacy or security standpoint. This has resulted in 38% of users feeling that some kind of proof of identity needs to be provided before a user can be allowed to access any kind of social media platform, and it’s pretty easy to see just why this might happen to be the case.

It seems that users lose trust in a company even if the name of said company was involved in a scam, with 46% of users saying that they stopped trusting a company if a scammer used its name to do whatever it was that they were attempting to do. 49% of consumers also felt that sharing any kind of information or data, whether or not it was of a personal nature, with social media companies was not something that they would feel all that comfortable doing.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that this crisis of trust can spell a lot of trouble for the vast majority of social media institutions that are out there in the present day. 40% of consumers were of the opinion that the responsibility lay with social media platforms when it came to fending off scams and cyber attacks, and while personal responsibility is undeniably something that also needs to be factored into the equation suffice it to say that it’s really not unfair for users to want the barest level of security from any and all services that they are accessing.

Social media platforms have a really long way to go before they can regain a lot of the trust that consumers have lost in them. While companies like Facebook are managing to weather the storms of controversy by diversifying their offerings and targeting different demographics, this is not a sustainable solution to the problem. The only way to keep going for these companies is to make themselves trustworthy by taking user privacy seriously once again.


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