Pew Report: 69% of US adults are not confident social networks will keep their data private and secure
Americans' Attitudes About Privacy, Security and Surveillance — The cascade of reports following the June 2013 government surveillance revelations by NSA contractor Edward Snowden …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 Pew report lands two years after the June 2013 Snowden-era surveillance disclosures reshaped how Americans think about who holds their data, and it puts a number on the trust deficit aimed specifically at social networks: 69% of US adults are not confident these platforms will keep their information private and secure.
The finding is not an outlier but the opening data point in a consistent Pew arc. Follow-up surveys show the same skepticism spreading across adjacent questions — by late 2019 roughly six in ten adults believed they could not avoid data collection at all (Pew's data-collection survey), while a separate poll found 69% had little confidence social networks could correctly police offensive content even as 66% wanted them to (content-moderation confidence poll).
First-order effects
- Social networks carry a quantified trust penalty from their own users: with 69% doubting data protection, platforms like Facebook must treat privacy assurance as a product requirement, not a policy footnote.
- The distrust is already behavioral — a related study found 45% of online US households refrained from some online activities over security and privacy concerns, meaning hesitation shows up in usage, not just opinion polls.
Second-order effects
- Competing platforms gain a differentiation lever: any network that can credibly demonstrate data handling wins share from rivals carrying the 69% doubt, pushing privacy claims into marketing and product design.
- The skepticism extends beyond social networks to the broader ecosystem — by early 2020, 74% of Americans had little or no confidence in companies like Facebook and Google preventing misuse of their platforms for election influence (Pew's election-confidence survey), raising the reputational cost for advertisers and partners attached to those platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sustained public distrust becomes a standing argument for regulation: the same survey line shows majorities expecting legal guardrails, including 77% who believe government should need a warrant to buy detailed location data (warrant-for-location-data survey).
- Structurally, the trust gap pushes the industry toward treating user data as a liability to be minimized rather than an asset to be maximized — a shift visible in the steady drumbeat of Pew findings rather than any single event.
The trend: American distrust of how both corporations and government handle personal data has remained a stable, measurable feature of the post-2013 landscape, giving regulators and privacy-focused competitors a durable mandate.