Report: 53% did not delete Facebook or tighten their privacy settings after Cambridge Analytica scandal

Jeff Weisbein -

In the month since the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal began dominating the headlines, we had Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress, learned that the number of affected Facebook users increased to 87 million, and have seen a growing number of people participating in the #DeleteFacebook movement. While I’m not happy about the way the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal has played out, I have decided to keep my Facebook account, at least, for now.

Nonetheless, the folks over at Blind, an anonymous work talk app that lets you discuss things anonymously with your colleagues, conducted a survey with their users to find out whether or not people had deleted their Facebook accounts. All in, nearly 5,000 people responded to the survey and 13.7% said ‘Yes,’ which, clearly isn’t good news for Zuck & Co., however, what shocked me most about the results of the survey was that 53% of respondents didn’t delete their account and also didn’t tighten their privacy settings. The part that makes this shocking to me is that these people didn’t adjust their privacy settings at all and they represent the majority of respondents.

The only thing that I could think of in terms of the overwhelming number of people who didn’t delete or adjust their privacy settings is that a majority of the people who use Blind work within the tech industry, which may (and I need to stress this: may) mean they were more careful about their settings initially. That being said, I had my Facebook account privacy settings highly customized prior to this scandal, but I still found myself going through and making some additional tweaks after this whole ordeal.

Blind ran the survey from 4/13 through 4/19, you can find the complete results below:

  1. Yes. 678 (13.7%)

  2. No, but I tightened my privacy settings. 1,169 (23.6%)

  3. No, and I didn’t adjust my privacy settings either. 2,627 (53.1%)

  4. I didn’t have Facebook before the incident. 477 (9.6%)

I’d love to hear from you, did you delete Facebook? Let me know in the comments or tweet me.