According to a survey conducted by messaging app Viber, which by the way is direct competition to Facebook-owned WhatsApp, Viber asked 2,000 participants from the U.S. and UK if they would trust Facebook to keep their information secure when using its new crypto payment service, Libra which launches next year. Nearly half of all Americans (49%) say they would not trust Facebook at all, and barely 3% of Americans say they would be willing to try Libra for payments.
Over in the UK, only 1.4 percent of Brits would consider trying Libra, while 49% also said they did not trust Facebook at all to keep their information secure. In addition, 13.9 percent of Americans and 16.6 percent of Brits said that they definitely wouldn't use Libra for payments.
When the survey results are broken down by gender, women are much less likely to trust Facebook, with only 1.8 percent of women from the US willing to try Libra for payments, compared to 3.2 percent of men. In the UK, only 1.7 percent of men were willing to try Libra for payments, while even less women at 1.1 percent were willing to use the currency.
Gen Z users are the most likely to try the Libra cryptocurrency at 2.7 percent, while they were also the most trusting in that they also agreed that Facebook would keep their info secure at only 4.1 percent. In the UK though, this position is reversed, with zero percent of Generation Z willing to try Libra payments, while 1.5 percent of baby boomers, and 2.1 percent of Millennials would.
The results are hardly surprising given the widely reported scandal on Cambridge Analytica where it became clear that Facebook sold data on its users. Facebook are facing a fine north of $100 million from the to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the privacy breaches, while the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office levied a fine of £500,000 on the company in relation to its privacy violations last October.
You can read the full Viber report here, but it's clear that Facebook has a long way to go in winning back the trust of its users and even whole countries, with France questioning the currency, as well as Japan and China conducting its own investigations, among others.
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