A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2,237 subjects found that the majority of Americans (59%) "do not trust Facebook to obey US privacy laws."
US privacy laws are among the weakest in the developed world, the lowest difficulty-setting for a company like Facebook to play on (Germany, on the other hand, plays the same role in global privacy regulation that California plays in automotive safety: a territory with strict rules that all the giants have to comply with everywhere in order to gain access to its lucrative market).
Facebook fared worse than competitors like Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Some 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66 percent who said they trust Amazon, 62 percent who trust Google, 60 percent for Microsoft and 47 percent for Yahoo……Some 63 percent said they would like to see “less targeted advertising” in the future, while 9 percent said they wanted more. When asked to compare them with traditional forms of advertising, 41 percent said targeted ads are “worse” while 21 percent said they are “better…”
…A plurality of adults said they would like the government to take a bigger role in overseeing the industry’s handling of user information. According to the poll, 46 percent of adults said they want more government regulation, while 17 percent said they want less. Another 20 percent said they wanted no change, and the remaining 18 percent said they did not know.
Americans less likely to trust Facebook than rivals on personal data: Reuters/Ipsos poll [Chris Kahn and David Ingram/Reuters]
(Image: Brian Solis, CC-BY)
(via Naked Capitalism)
