Nine out of 10 US citizens do not trust social media. In some other developed markets, trust in services such as Facebook is even lower. In the UK, only three percent of consumers trust social media services with their personal data, and in Japan, it is only two percent, about one in fifty.
Thales 2024 Digital Trust Index, which surveyed 12,426 people worldwide, reports that, while the majority of users mistrust social media and online retail and entertainment services, trust in some other services is far higher. Consumers have much more trust in banking, healthcare, and government services when it comes to sharing their personal data – a universal trend witnessed in all the markets surveyed. Banking services are the most highly trusted with 44 percent of users placing their trust in them. This was closely followed by healthcare with 41 percent and government services with 37 percent.
“This is perhaps unsurprising when considering how highly regulated these industries are, the types of information they are responsible for handling, and the measures they have put in place to keep consumer data secure,” says Thales.
Banking, for example, tops the trust index as it is subject to stringent directives such as Europe’s Second Payment Services Directive (PDS2). Such legislation is constantly introduced to enhance the security of online payments as well as to promote competition.
Trust stats make grim reading for Silicon Valley
While social media services score the lowest trust level, at only six percent worldwide, they are closely followed by other online services on which Silicon Valley has bet the farm: media and entertainment and online retail. The statistics make grim reading for online retail giant Amazon, as only seven percent of users worldwide actually trust online retail services. Nor is the news very encouraging for the likes of internet entertainment giants like Netflix and Disney, as only 8 percent of consumers worldwide say that they would trust online media and entertainment services.
Silicon Valley launched these online services at a time when such sectors were largely unregulated, as was the internet itself. Netflix launched twenty-seven years ago with Facebook being founded earlier this century. After Facebook executives and major shareholders finished popping the Champagne corks to celebrate the organization’s twentieth anniversary earlier this month, they will have plenty of time to reflect on the main reason why so many Western consumers are now turning their back on online services such as theirs.
According to Thales, the overriding reason for the astronomically high levels of mistrust in social media and entertainment services is a perceived lack of effective cybersecurity. Facebook customers, for example, have been plagued by significant cyber-breaches for the last five years or more.
The most recent example was reported this week with a massive data breach exposing the phone numbers, email addresses, and personal information of 200,000 Facebook Marketplace users. At the time of going to press, these details are still reported to be available to the highest bidder(s) on that largely unpoliced part of the internet, the Dark Web, where cybercriminal gangs prefer to do business.
