World

Some US Users Started to Log in Facebook Less Often After Data Leak Scandal

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Every fourth user of the Facebook social network in the United States began to use it less frequently or completely abandoned it after a personal data leak scandal involving UK consultancy Cambridge Analytica, a fresh survey showed on Sunday.
Sputnik

First reports about the misuse of Facebook data emerged in March. Facebook has acknowledged that Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of up to 87 million users of the social media site without the users' permission. The firm gathered the information from social media accounts to develop a mechanism that would predict and influence the behavior of voters. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the users and promised to improve the security situation, however, he later admitted that it might take several years to fix the network's privacy issues.

According to the Reuters/Ipsos survey, almost half, or 49 percent, of US-based Facebook users said they had not curbed social network use since the scandal emerged, while almost a quarter of those surveyed (26 percent) noted that they use the social network even more often.

READ MORE: Daesh Make 'Friends': Facebook Blamed for Introducing Terrorists to One Another

The remaining 23 percent of respondents said that they had recently scaled down the use of Facebook, did not use it at all or deleted their accounts.

As many 64 percent of those surveyed said they use social networking at least once a day, 4 percentage points down from March, when the company conducted a similar poll immediately after the scandal with Cambridge Analytica.

READ MORE: Expert Details Cambridge Analytica Investigation, Data Misuse

The survey was conducted among 1,938 adult Facebook users in the United States on April 26-30, the margin of error is 2.5 percent.

Discuss