1 in 10 Americans say they have deleted their Facebook accounts – study

MANILA, Philippines – Techpinions, a tech research firm recently published a survey of 1,000 Americans, said to be representative of the population in terms of gender and age, investigating what changes they have recently made with how they used the platform.

The study found 17% said they deleted the Facebook app from their phones, 11% said they deleted it from other devices, and another 9% said they deleted their accounts completely due to concerns regarding privacy. Others in the free format comments said that they would continue to check their Facebook feeds except this time, they would not engage.

As Techradar put into perspective, there are 36.38 million people who have deleted the mobile app and 19.26 million who have deleted their accounts out of the 214 million total Facebook users in the US.

Majority of the respondents, making up 39% of the study, said that they are now more careful with what they post and the posts they interact with, while 35% said they are using the platform much less than they used to. Another 31% meanwhile changed their settings.

Carolina Milanesi, the author of the study, found that when asked on how Facebook can regain user trust, rather than getting more tools and settings, a lot of the users are asking for the company’s transparency. She adds that managing what information can and can not be used by Facebook is quite complicated saying, “Even if you understand the Facebook business model, you would be hard pushed to know how far your data goes.”

What’s more is that 15% are giving up on the platform altogether citing that there’s nothing Facebook can do to regain back their trust.

“Of course, if this sentiment were to be similar across other countries 15% of 2 billion users is a sizable chunk of the installed base that would disappear. What is interesting is that the number grows to 18% among people who said to be very aware of the Cambridge Analytica incident,” Milanesi said.

The data gathered from this study, should it also hold true for the larger Facebook-using populace, may prove to be particularly problematic for the social media giant since it needs engaged users to attract brands to pay for its services. – Rappler.com