Silicon Valley companies apparently don’t look too kindly on one of their own breaching user privacy expectations, according to a survey run by anonymous social app Blind in which 31-percent of the employees surveyed, all from top tech companies, said that they plan to join the #DeleteFacebook movement and disable their personal Facebook accounts. The published survey results included only companies with 50 or more respondents, and the more focused result subset includes only six firms. This means that the results are not entirely indicative of the tech world at large. To be specific, the number of respondents for the survey in total was around 2,600, and these were only users of Blind, an anonymous social app made for work-adjacent chat among employees of top tech firms.
Microsoft employees were the most vocal subset, with a full 50-percent of them deciding to flee Facebook. Indirect Facebook rival Snap, Inc., meanwhile, posted 46-percent. When it came to Uber, 40-percent of employees said that they would dump Facebook. 38-percent of surveyed Googlers had decided to ditch the social media giant. That number sank to 34-percent for employees of Amazon. The scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica and the resulting #DeleteFacebook movement are gargantuan, so much so that even the very people who commute to Menlo Park to work for Facebook aren’t entirely loyal; 2-percent of them said that they planned to get rid of their personal account, though it’s unclear how many, if any, decided to leave the company due to the scandal.
For the uninitiated, #DeleteFacebook came about as a result of mounting privacy concerns over a long period of time that came to a sudden and climactic head with the revelation of user data mishandling by Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm out of the UK that mined data from Facebook on an aggregated, anonymized basis at first, but over time managed to get their hands on larger and more specific stores of data. Such things are all but standard practice in the world of freely-provided big tech services, except for one key factor that was lacking here; user consent. Opting in and out of data collection in a number of ways has been a key part of privacy management on Facebook, but Cambridge Analytica’s tactics slipped past Facebook’s radar, despite the company’s commitment to not getting user data without permission. Now, Cambridge Analytica is in serious trouble of its own, and the spotlight is on Facebook as founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently prepares to testify before US authorities. Meanwhile, the #DeleteFacebook movement is picking up steam, and the many users jumping ship are making investors and stakeholders nervous about the company’s future.
