In a world of oversharing, here’s where people finally draw the line on Facebook.
After recent reports of Cambridge Analytica’s privacy violations affecting 50 million people, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg issued a mea culpa, and pledged to be more careful when vetting third party apps. It’s not yet clear how many of Facebook’s 2.2 billion monthly active users have actually decided to delete or deactivate their account, even though #DeleteFacebook was trending on Twitter TWTR, -3.34% and Facebook FB, -2.75% last month.
However, when it comes to mixing Facebook and finance, people balked: 91% said they wouldn’t trust Facebook to handle their payments or other financial services, according to a survey of 1,000 adults released Monday by personal-finance site MagnifyMoney. Facebook launched a Messenger Payments feature in 2015, but this was not disclosed to the respondents, and the survey’s authors assumed they were either not aware of the payments service or did not currently use it.
Some 79% of people said they did not use Messenger Payments, according to Statista. It faces stiff competition from Zelle, which moved $75 billion in 2017 across its payments network, up 36% on the year, compared to $35 billion via PayPal’s PYPL, -1.15% Venmo, up 97% on the year. (More than 60 financial institutions are part of Zelle, from small community banks and credit unions to JPM, -1.93% Bank of America BAC, -2.27% Capital One COF, -2.16% Citi C, +0.31% Wells Fargo WFC, -2.02% and Morgan Stanley MS, -2.30% ) (A spokeswoman for Facebook said it doesn’t break out Messenger Payments volume.)
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Among those who currently access their bank and financial accounts online, about a quarter of people said they’re considering no longer doing so with mobile apps or via the internet, the MagnifyMoney survey added. Whether they actually follow through on that , of course, remains to be seen. The survey was conducted on March 27 and 28, just days after the Cambridge Analytica story broke.
Facebook is sticky and Americans are comfortable using it for just about anything. That is, people use Facebook to network and log into their Tinder IAC, -3.46% account and will share the most intimate details of their lives, including their employment history, educational achievements, hopes, dreams, family photographs and “like” certain brands without a second thought. All of these seemingly trivial details add up to a treasure trove of data for marketers and advertisers.
The recent revelations of privacy violations concerning Cambridge Analytica hit Facebook’s stock, but for consumers they are less worrisome than last year’s Equifax EFX, -2.43% data breach, in which 145 million people had their profiles accessed, MagnifyMoney found. More than half of the MagnifyMoney survey respondents (54%) said they were more concerned about the Equifax breach than the Facebook privacy violations. The Equifax lapse impacted people’s Social Security numbers, which are critical for hackers to create false accounts. The Facebook privacy violation allegedly carried out by Cambridge Analytica accessed data from users’ accounts and those of their friends.