This survey is not scientific—The Atlantic pushed it out to readers on Facebook and Twitter, in newsletters, and through our membership program, no doubt skewing the demographics of the sample. The 2,218 respondents were 82 percent white and largely based in the United States. Fifty-nine percent were female, 40 percent were male, and 1 percent were nonbinary. A variety of ages are represented, though on the whole the sample leans older.

Nonetheless, the results offer a glimpse at what people are and aren’t willing to share on social media, how much they trust different platforms, and what effect privacy concerns have on user behavior. I also did follow-up interviews with several people to get a more detailed view of their feelings about social-media privacy.

Overall, 78.8 percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the privacy of their information on social media, and 82.2 percent said they self-censor on social media. According to Das’s analysis, older people were more likely than younger people to report self-censoring because of privacy concerns, though the likelihood was 75 percent or above for all age groups. “Self-censorship,” for this survey, was defined as stopping yourself from posting something you might otherwise want to share, because of concerns about privacy.

David Garvey, a 27-year-old sales director in Boston, has been self-censoring since long before Cambridge Analytica, after photos of him drinking in high school found their way to Facebook, where a friend’s mother saw them and alerted his headmaster.

“Right off the bat I ... understood that anything you post on there can be seen pretty much by anyone at any time,” Garvey says. “So I don’t really post anything at all. Anything that could be out there for public consumption, I try to manage very closely.” Garvey says he is “not at all” concerned about his privacy on social media, because he’s already so careful about what he posts.

Among survey participants, Facebook was by far the most used and the least trusted social network—57.9 percent of the platform’s users said they “mostly distrusted” Facebook or had “no trust” in it to keep their personal information private and secure. Every other platform—Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat—had a wider distribution of responses, and a larger portion of people saying they felt “neutral/unsure.” Even Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, was more trusted. A couple people who felt that way told me they did know Facebook owned Instagram, but just felt that the information shared on Instagram—pictures, mostly—was less exploitable.

In an email, a Facebook spokesperson told me the company hasn’t seen “any meaningful impact” on user behavior in the past couple months, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March. “What we have seen is that people now care more about data privacy and understanding the controls and choices they have.” In response to that desire, the company has made privacy settings easier to find and plans to develop a “Clear History” feature that allows users to delete the data Facebook has accumulated on them from outside sources.