The Washington Post poll drew attention to the disconnect many consumers have between the companies they trust and the products they use.
The poll, carried out by Schar School in partnership with the WP, surveyed a random sample of US Internet users. It presented them with nine tech giants, and for each asked whether they trusted them, distrusted them, or had no opinion.
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, said of her technology. “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.”
For Apple, the results were 44% trusted ‘a great deal/a good amount’ against 40% ‘not much/not at all’ and 16% don’t know.
The reliability of the data is called into question by a couple of things over and above the strange result. First, the relatively small sample size gives a stated error margin of +/-4%. That means the Apple trust figure could be anywhere in the 40-48% range, while the Google one, for example, could be anywhere in the 44-52% range. Thus the true positions could be reversed.
Second, it seems the WP isn’t even sure how large the sample is anyway, since the piece itself says it was 1,122 people, while the graphic says it was 1,058…
Photo: Stormseeker/Unsplash
