“I have yet to read an article that says a single person has been harmed by the breach,” he said. “Nobody’s outraged on a visceral level.” Facebook declined to comment.
Its executives have apologized for the data-harvesting, pledged to investigate others who collected Facebook user data and reduced the amount of data available to similar app developers now.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke on March 16, sparking interest online in the hashtag #deletefacebook. In its first quarter results, however, Facebook said the number of monthly users in the United States and Canada rose to 241 million on March 31 from 239 million on Dec. 31, growth that was roughly in line with recent years.
According to the poll, more Facebook users said they knew how to guard their personal information on the site than users of other social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. It found that 74 percent of Facebook users said they were aware of their current privacy settings, and 78 percent said they knew how to change them.
In comparison, 60 percent of Instagram users said they knew their current privacy settings and 65 percent said they knew how to change them. And 55 percent of Twitter users knew their privacy settings, and 58 percent knew how to use them.
Despite their understanding of Facebook’s privacy settings, only 23 percent of its users said they have “total control” over the information they store on the platform. Another 49 percent said they have “some control,” and 20 percent said they had “no control.” The remaining 9 percent said they do not know how much control they have.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 2,194 adults, including 1,938 Facebook users, 1,167 Twitter users and 1,237 Instagram users.
It has a credibility interval of 3 percentage points, meaning that the results could vary in either direction by that amount. (Reporting by Chris Kahn in New York and David Ingram in San Francisco; Editing by Peter Henderson and Cynthia Osterman).
SOURCE: CNBC