The news out of Facebook HQ in recent months should have been enough to make you nervous. In March, the company revealed that data from 87 million people had been improperly harvested and saved by Cambridge Analytica. (And then, depending on whom you asked, that data was possibly used to swing the 2016 election.) Android users discovered that Facebook had been tracking their call and text logs. People realized that Facebook had saved every video they’d ever filmed via the platform, even if they never posted them. Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress, and the company hurried to push a new centralized security system so that users could have a better understanding of exactly what they were sharing with Facebook. All of this, again, should have been enough to make you nervous, if not consider deleting your Facebook entirely. Or at the very least, using your account less and with a lot more scrutiny.
According to a poll from Reuters/Ipsos, this isn’t what happened. Instead, well, not a whole lot has happened. The study found that half of Facebook users surveyed were using the platform exactly as they had before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and that another 25 percent said they were using it more. Sixty-four percent of adults surveyed still said they used Facebook daily. (That number was 68 percent in an earlier survey this year, Reuters reports.) The study polled just over 2,000 Americans and was conducted over several days at the end of April.
Earlier this month, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, announced that they were shutting down. Well, it wasn’t so much announced, but more the company directing all of its employees to immediately turn in their key cards.
