Read the findings from my recent survey.

Following up on the survey about personally identifiable information on the internet, I have since exported and analysed the data for your viewing pleasure. Consisting of nine questions, the survey received 51 responses which I have interpreted below.

Firstly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, 88.2% of respondents considered the security of their personally identifiable information (PII) on the internet to be important or very important. There didn’t appear to be any correlation between these answers and the respondents’ age group, however, what’s concerning is that only 13.7% of the survey takers answered that they were satisfied or very satisfied with how businesses protect their personal information. While a low number was certainly expected considering the numerous scandals in recent years relating to large corporations’ use of PII, such a low percentage shows that not enough is being done. The European Union has certainly moved a step in the right direction with the introduction of GDPR, although countries in other parts of the world still have much reform to go through.

Respondents did not feel their personal information was secure.

Facebook’s reputation has plunged in recent years due to numerous issues but one of the most notable reasons was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As part of the poll, I asked respondents to choose which words they would associate with the Facebook brand. The options were the following:

Trustworthy

Untrustworthy

Secure

Unsecure

Harmless

Harmful

Honest

Dishonest

Of the 51 responses, not a single entry considered Facebook to be trustworthy or honest, although 94.1% of people see the brand as untrustworthy. Narrowing this down to only users who currently have an account on Facebook or Facebook Messenger, the percentage of users who consider it untrustworthy drops slightly to 90%. While this would be expected, I must note it’s also possible that this is an anomaly due to the small sample size.

Facebook is considered untrustworthy.

‘Unsecure’ was the least picked negative word whilst ‘secure’ was the most picked positive association, with 60.8% and 9.8% respectively, suggesting that people are least concerned about the security of the platform. That should be questioned considering Facebook has come under fire for not fixing an issue which resulted in their biggest security breach at the time. The breach affected 50 million users, however, that is minuscule compared to the 2.5 billion active accounts the site. What’s not so minuscule, is the 267 million names and phone numbers that were found on an unsecured public database back in December 2019. Not big enough? How about the 419 million records that were found last September including phone numbers, names, genders, and the victim’s country. Having said all that, it’s possible the word (un)secure may be interpreted differently depending on the person, slightly altering the results of the survey.

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I also asked identical questions about Google and the results were very different. The most popular associations are still negative – the second, third, and fourth spot are taken up by ‘untrustworthy’ (47.1%), ‘dishonest’ (45.1%), and ‘harmful’ (31.4%). However, the top spot is taken up by ‘secure’ with 60.8%.

One of the key takeaways from this is Google’s security is superior to Facebook. It’s hard to argue with this point – during my research the only concrete breaches in recent times I was able to find were the five millions Gmail passwords leaked during 2014 (less than 2% of the passwords would have worked according to the company) as well as the Google+ leak which was so popular that Google eventually decided to shut down the service.

The public believes Google’s services are secure.

Just because the California technology giant appears to at least have decent security doesn’t stop it from shady business practices. The company famously distanced itself from its “don’t be evil” motto from its earlier days and some of Google’s actions have followed suit.

Google has been on the receiving end of one of the biggest GDPR fines to date of £44 million for “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalisation” as stated by the French data regulator. A much bigger fine, however, was the £2.1 billion the company was fined for abusing its market dominance to promote its shopping service.

A page on the social media site Reddit was even created to look for alternatives to Google products. With 24,700 members, r/DeGoogle was launched in 2017 and has since inspired a similar-minded r/CorpFree to ‘Free yourself from intrusive corporations’.

To finish off the survey, I wanted to see whether there was any correlation between using a Facebook account and how many negative words a user would associate with the ‘Zucc Book’. I used the social media platform, rather than Google as their ubiquity made it difficult to find respondents without an account or one that has since been deleted.

Firstly, looking at users with an account who use it at least weekly, the respondents associated with 2.8 negative words on average, compared to 2.79 words for users who don’t use their accounts weekly. The very small difference between these two can be put down to the small sample size as well as the fact that a user’s social media usage habits wouldn’t necessarily impact their opinion of a company.

Now looking at the respondents who have taken the time to deactivate or delete the account, or anyone that’s never owned one, the average number of negative word associations rises to 3.67 in both cases showing a clear correlation between a company’s reputation and how it influences a userbase.

Looking back to summarise the experiment, it’s clear that public satisfaction of businesses handling their personal information is critically low. Of course, I’ve picked two controversial tech companies to study and I’m not saying they’re all equally bad, however some are certainly worse than others. Ultimately, a range of factors could cause a leak of personal data, however, most of these are shortcomings whether it be poor security practices, insufficient training or plain old negligence.

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