Research

Authors’ note: Product teams at Facebook rely on research along with other external factors to design and build products. This article discusses research conducted by Facebook's Privacy Research Team to better understand people's privacy concerns.

• We conducted a survey to measure privacy concerns across a range of popular apps and topics. The percent of respondents concerned about each privacy topic that we measured was similar across all of the apps.
• The results suggest that people’s privacy concerns for individual apps might have more to do with their beliefs about privacy topics in general than they do with their beliefs about the apps themselves or their experiences using those apps. For example, whether someone is concerned about Facebook using information to personalize ads may largely reflect whether that person is concerned about ad personalization by any app.
• We discuss the implications for how companies might try to address users’ privacy concerns for their products in light of these results.