31% of Tech Workers Say They Will #DeleteFacebook

A recent survey from Team Blind showed that out of 2,600 tech workers surveyed 31% of them said they will delete their Facebook accounts. The other 69% said they would not delete their accounts from the social media site. 

The survey ran from 20 March to 24 March mere days after the news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook data breach broke. The survey wan run by Team Blind on their app Blind – an anonymous workplace app for tech workers – who then created a chart to showcase the results of this survey.

When asked if they planned on deleting Facebook 50% of the Microsoft employees surveyed said yes. 46% of Snapchat employees said yes. Uber and Google took up the middle of the table with 40% and 38% of their respective employees saying they will delete Facebook. At the bottom, unsurprisingly, was Facebook itself with only 2% of its employees saying they would delete their Facebook accounts.

The #DeleteFacebook movement comes hot on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A report by Channel 4 News found that at least 50 million Facebook users’ data had been used by the England-based data-profiling company. Cambridge Analytica has also been accused of interfering in various elections from the 2015 Nigerian Presidential election to the 2016 US Presidential election.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the breach but has refused to fire staff or step down as CEO following what he referred to as a “mistake”. More recent figures suggest that up to 87 million people have had information and data scraped from their Facebook profile. The risk of data scraping is further increased if people allowed others to search for them by the phone number or email listed on their Facebook instead of their name.

Though data scraping already occurs on Facebook with the company itself selling user data to advertisers and companies what Cambridge Analytica has done goes a step further. With this information and who the company sells it to political opinion can be influenced with the likes of fake news supplied by agencies who have hired Cambridge Analytica or similar companies. This will further embroil the likes of not only Facebook and possibly its subsidiaries such as Instagram but others such as Google and Snapchat in a fake news scandal.

Team Blind created their Blind app in order to focus on transparency in the workplace. By removing workplace hierarchies with their app Team Blind creates a more open and equal working environment for the company’s that use the app. Something which the likes of Facebook could learn a great deal from but on a more global scale.

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