28 percent of people say they don't trust Facebook at all
Technically Incorrect: In a new poll, people merrily admit to giving Facebook their data while in the same breath saying they don't trust the site.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
How can you not trust him?
Facebook was once just a social network.
Now it would prefer to be, well, the Internet.
It wants everyone to be on it and to do everything on it. It's like a parent that hates it when their child leaves home.
Has this, though, increased people's trust in Facebook? A new Huffington Post/YouGov poll suggests that there's still a little work for Facebook to do. Or, perhaps, for us to do.
Twenty-eight percent of the 1,000 respondents surveyed between April 22 and 25 said they trusted Facebook with their data "not at all."
These must be outlying recalcitrants, surely. Or Google employees. But no. Another 34 percent said they trusted Facebook "not much."
Still, that's only 62 percent of people. That must mean 38 percent of people trust Facebook a lot. Not quite, it seems. An enormous 3 percent trust Facebook "a lot."
That sounds like the perfect relationship, doesn't it? (In case, you're math obsessed, 32 percent said they trusted Facebook "somewhat." Which may have been somewhat polite. And 3 percent were "unsure.")
Facebook declined to comment. However, it's easy to conclude that this poll is a robust condemnation of Facebook's ways.
It isn't. It's a condemnation of ours.
Facebook's attempts to hide its intentions are akin to those of a man in a bank wearing a Bill Clinton mask and holding a gun and a very large bag.
We're the ones who decided to take Facebook's offer of a free space in which we could fool our "friends" into believing that we're happy. We're the ones who enjoy this free space so much that we can barely get off it.
We're the ones who didn't bother thinking about how Facebook was making money. We took it for all it was worth.
We're hardly, therefore, in a position to complain that we don't trust Mark Zuckerberg and his amiably robotic crew.
We answer surveys in ways that make us look and feel better. The truth is, however, that we're slightly indecent hypocrites who fool ourselves into sanctimony.
It may well be that future generations will recoil from the current mass penchant for putting it all out there, no matter that the data will live forever and perhaps come back to nibble on our behinds.
The glorious thing, though, is that with all its AI development and global ubiquity, Facebook will see it coming.