The Washington Post published a poll revealing that, out of 9 tech giants, US consumers trust Apple the least in handling their data.
A new Washington Post poll conducted in partnership with Schar School reveals that Americans trust Apple less than Google and Amazon. According to the recent survey, only 44% of those interviewed trust Apple, compared to 48% who expressed their trust in Google and 53% in Amazon.
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In addition to comparing views on the tech giants, the poll also highlighted the divide among consumers between how they feel towards the tech products they incorporate in their daily lives and the companies responsible for creating and delivering such products and services.
“You’ll find all the usual technology suspects inside Mary Veselka’s Pearland, Tex., home. There’s her iPhone, a school-issued iPad for her young daughter, and the latest boxes delivered from Amazon,” reads the report.
“The full-time mother has an active Facebook account and a TikTok account, and sitting in her living room is an Echo speaker, its Alexa voice assistant always ready to add items to her shopping list or turn off the lights. Like many Americans, Veselka’s daily life is saturated with the products and services pushed by big technology companies, paid and free. And like many Americans, she simultaneously does not trust the businesses or the people running them when it comes to privacy issues, but can’t simply shake them off, either. She doesn’t like the way Facebook collects her personal data to target ads or the kinds of videos YouTube offers to her child, and she suspects that her devices are always listening.”
“We go into it knowing that we can’t really trust them, but I don’t think we can get around not using it,” Veselka, 30, explains. “I’ve tried giving up Facebook for a period of time. … It’s just not really something you can do and still maintain a regular social life.”
The poll surveyed a random sample of over one thousand US Internet users, asking them if they trusted, distrusted, or had no opinion over nine tech giants.
When surveying Apple, 44% of people expressed that they trusted the company “a great deal/good amount” as opposed to 40% who said they trusted it “not much/not at all.”
The platform shown the most mistrust is Facebook, with 72% of respondents expressing their lack of confidence in how the company handles their private information and data about their internet activity, followed by TikTok, Instagram, Whatsapp, and YouTube, which took a hit from between 53% and 63% of respondents.
The big tech company scoring the highest confidence points was Amazon, with 53% of respondents expressing their trust.