Worried about how much of your dirt is out there on Facebook? Well, according to a new poll, you’re in the minority.
70 percent of U.S.-based Facebook users polled in a recent survey said they were comfortable with the personal information they have on the site. 23 percent said they were uncomfortable, and seven percent had “no opinion.”
Facebook is such a hot topic that extra caution is needed when evaluating third-party information about the site, but this data seems legit: The survey was a conducted last week via telephone across 1,174 registered voters by Poll Position, the polling firm run by former CNN executive Eason Jordan.
Not surprisingly, the poll showed that young people were more comfortable with their Facebook personas than older people. In the 18 to 29 year old age group, 81 percent of Facebook users said they were OK with the personal information they provide on the site; in the 65 and older category, only 50 percent said they felt comfortable with it.
In some respects, the poll is surprising: After all, Facebook has come under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly being duplicitous with users about how their information has historically been handled on the social networking site. In response, Facebook has made a series of recent feature additions aimed at making it easier for users to understand how much of their data is visible on Facebook and to whom, so that could play a part in the current public opinion. But the poll also makes sense on a basic level: Facebook probably wouldn’t be as widely used as it is — more than 800 million users at the moment — if all those people were uncomfortable with sharing on the site.
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