If individuals feel unsafe on social media, many take on the personal burden of maintaining their online safety in a variety of ways. The most common strategies respondents employ to stay safe are only adding known personal contacts as friends or connections on social media apps (59%) and manually reviewing social media platforms’ privacy settings (59%). Surprisingly, only 35% of individuals log out of different websites after use and only 45% of users use unique passwords for social media accounts.
On the other hand, people tend to be protective of their children’s social media usage. One in four respondents report that they do not allow their children to have social media accounts. And yet, whereas most individuals review their own privacy settings manually, only 18% of parents whose children use social media actually go check their children’s privacy settings.
Protecting children from hacking or unsafe contact on the internet is becoming a bigger part of the national conversation, and with such low individual regulation by parents, perhaps security advising at a larger level may be worth pursuing to keep children safe.
However safe we are on social media, hackers are always two steps ahead of most users. Therefore, we wanted to know which apps individuals had been hacked on most often.
Overall, only one in three respondents report that they had been hacked on social media, a number far lower than other commercial data hacking we often hear about in the news. However, that statistic was not spread evenly across platforms. In fact, seven out of 10 individuals who had been hacked on social media experienced their hacking on Facebook, a staggering number considering that about 70% of Americans use the site.2
So what do people do when they get hacked or when they have any major privacy concern for that matter? Almost half of the individuals surveyed have deleted social media accounts out of concern for privacy, with Facebook and Instagram being the most frequently deleted apps.
With such high rates of deletion for privacy concerns, it is clear that customer privacy and online safety should be a top priority for social media companies who make more money from high numbers of active users. For many individuals, the question of whether companies will actually work to improve privacy is very important.
So, where does all this leave us? With customers reporting strikingly high frequency of social media hacking despite cautious habits and even app deletions, there is still a general attitude that social media usage is unsafe.
This sentiment is best proven by responses to our final questions about popular opinion on safety and societal concern for social media security. On a scale from 1 to 10, respondents rank their concern for personal security on social media at an average of 7.3 points. Concern for societal importance of social media security averages an even higher 7.5 points.
