Trust Social Networks with Your Data? Nah. Use Social Anyway? Yep.

Most US internet users say they don't trust social networks to protect their personal information.

A May 2018 survey by Rad Campaign found that 61% of respondents had little to no trust in social networks. That compares with 53% in 2016, and 57% in 2014.

Millennials, defined in the report as ages 18 to 35, were the least critical of social platforms, but more than half (56%) still said they didn't trust social networks to protect their data.

Facebook has been at the center of the debate over privacy and data misuse, but early signs suggest that the controversy hasn't significantly affected usage. A Thomson Reuters survey conducted by Ipsos in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal found that nearly half of US Facebook users hadn’t changed how frequently they use the platform—and in fact about one-quarter of the respondents said they use it more.

However, the survey found that privacy concerns had caused users to limit what they were willing to share.

The Rad Campaign report also found little evidence that worries about privacy are keeping users off of social sites. Among its survey base, 87% said they use social media, an increase of 7 percentage points from 2016.

Digging down to specific platforms, some 73% of respondents reported using Facebook daily, up from 70% in 2016. For Instagram, 32% said they were daily users, up sharply from 21% two years earlier. Snapchat's figure was 20%, up from 12% in 2014. But Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr levels were a bit off from the previous survey.