One has to assume it’s a citation Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried mightily to avoid receiving. But with a massive data breach last year and poor marketing decision-making accompanied by a wave of bad publicity, it shouldn’t come as a major shock that Facebook is now considered the least trusted major technology brand by consumers.
The real surprise is by how much it outscores everyone else. Really, Facebook’s in a class by itself.
Recently, online survey research firm Toluna conducted a poll of ~1,000 adults age 18 or older in which it asked respondents to identify their “least trusted” technology company.
The results of the survey show the degree to which Facebook has become the “face” of everything that’s wrong with trust in the world of technology.
Here’s what Toluna’s found when it asked consumers to name the technology company they trusted least with their personal information:
- Facebook: ~40% of respondents trust least
- Amazon: ~8%
- Twitter: ~8%
- Uber: ~7%
- Google (Gmail): ~6%
- Lyft: ~6%
- Apple: ~4%
- Microsoft: ~2%
- Netflix: ~1%
- Tesla: ~1%
The yawning gap between Facebook’s unflattering perch at the top of the listing and the next most-cited companies — Amazon and Twitter — says everything anyone needs to know about the changing fortunes of company image and how fast public opinion can turn against it.
About the only thing worse is not showing up on the Top 10 list at all – which is the case for Oath (the parent of Yahoo and AOL). That entity has become so inconsequential, it doesn’t even enter into the conversation anymore. That’s a “diss” on a completely different level, of course. As Oscar Wilde once said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is … not being talked about.”
What about you? Do you think that Facebook should be tops on this list? Let us know your opinion below.
Nones Notes 
I have a different take on what’s wrong with Facebook. I’m not worried about “friend” requests from Russian robots or violation of my privacy. I don’t have job-threatening secret habits I don’t want exposed.
I just consider the very premise of Facebook offensive and presumptuous with its fake intimacy: the notion that Mark Zuckerberg can choose your friends for you.
Who the hell is this man to tell me with whom to associate? To begin with, he stole Facebook from the Winklevoss twins at Harvard. He himself is not worthy of trust.
But more importantly, the “progressive” premise at the heart of Facebook is ridiculous. The notion that all humans want to be intimate friends with everyone else? Not true.
The most successful country in the world is Switzerland. The French, Germans and Italians living there stay away from each other because they are so inherently different, culturally. And the result? No war in 500 years!
Facebook has limited utility for me. I trust it to tell me when someone I don’t know well has a birthday. But its fake familiarity is as offensive to me as a Gerber commercial that pretends to know “Baby”!