STE WILLIAMS

And the results of our "How trustworthy is Facebook" poll are…

FacebookAs we reported recently, Facebook has been asking its users whether they think it is trustworthy (whatever that means), but it’s not actually sharing the results.

So we ran our own poll of how many people trust Facebook and hereby present the results.

(NB: to be clear, we once again hereby define “people” as being “our readers.”)

As of 15 January, out of 3,468 Naked Security-reading respondents, 0.52%, or 18 readers, reported that they find Facebook “extremely trustworthy”.

One commenter on the poll was curious as to the poll demographics.

Or, rather, as “Ghostie Withpurplehair” clarified, s/he was “mostly curious as to who actually voted for ‘Extremely trustworthy'” and whether they might be interested in real estate proposals:

Do they work for facebook, or should I start working on some deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge?

Here are the full poll results:

How trustworthy is Facebook overall?

  • Not at all trustworthy 72.96% (2,530 votes)
  • Slightly trustworthy 20.01% (694 votes)
  • Somewhat trustworthy 5.62% (195 votes)
  • Very trustworthy 0.89% (31 votes)
  • Extremely trustworthy 0.52% (18 votes)
  • Total Votes: 3,468

As many story commenters pointed out, the results of this poll are utterly skewed.

One such, “empp”, had this to say:

People who are concerned about security are much more likely to view articles on this site and less likely to trust any site blindly. The results are definitely skewed. I would be interested in how people have responded to the poll on facebook since the demands of that situation are different and regular users may not be as likely to express their skepticism there. I would suspect it is not as positive as they would like, otherwise they might be more inclined to release them.

Empp, I too would be interested in seeing the results of Facebook’s inquiry.

I’d be particularly interested to see how large is the discrepancy between the general Facebook user population and a population that takes the time to read about Facebook’s and other companies’ security lapses and such companies’ approaches to user privacy.

Those who don’t read security blogs such as Naked Security are, one assumes, far less likely to read about Facebook’s transgressions, such as when the service has revealed things such as someone’s friends list even if it’s set to private, for example.

Would it be wrong to assume that people who actually read about security know what they’re talking when they report that they find Facebook untrustworthy? I don’t think so.

Your thoughts? Please share in the comments section below.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/6B-A4DiExQg/

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