Most Facebook employees wouldn’t trust it with their financial data: survey

By Nicholas Marinoff

Between Facebook’s Libra project and Google’s new Google Pay-linked checking accounts, Big Tech is demonstrating big plans to integrate itself into the world of digital finance.

But you won’t find many tech and finance professionals jumping at the chance to use such services, according to a new survey conducted by Blind, an app-based “anonymous social network.”

The survey, released today, polled more than 5,000 professionals working at various companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Uber. The study found that the vast majority of professionals, roughly 62 percent, would still sooner trust “traditional banks” over “big tech” with their financial data. Of the tech professionals polled, 57 percent said they trust banks more than large tech companies, while nearly 70 percent of those working in finance said they’d prefer traditional institutions.

What’s more, some employees of tech companies don’t even trust their own companies with their financial information—least of all at Uber and Facebook.

Of the 186 Facebook employees polled, only 21 percent said they would entrust their data to the social media giant. (Uber scored even lower—a dismal 16 percent, though only 45 Uber employees participated in the survey.)

The results suggest that even Facebook employees wouldn’t trust Libra, the stablecoin project led by Facebook, with their financial information. Curie Kim, Blind’s brand marketing manager responsible for conducting the survey, clarified in an interview with Decrypt, however, that the survey did not specifically ask about Libra. Nevertheless, it isn’t a big leap to make, given Facebook’s association with Libra, despite the firm’s best efforts to separate itself, and its reputation, from the project.

Libra has experienced a very mixed response since it first emerged in June of this year. While some saw Libra as a way to take crypto mainstream and legitimize the industry, others, particularly regulators, have been hesitant to accept the project as the noble effort that it claims to be.

Both Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, and David Marcus, the head of the company’s blockchain division, have been grilled by members of the U.S. Congress over the past few months regarding Libra and its supposed potential to facilitate money laundering and other white-collar crimes—not to mention the privacy concerns that the project has raised.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, given Facebook’s many publicized data scandals, including the Cambridge Analytica fiasco last year, that even its own employees may not be too keen on handing over sensitive financial data to the company.

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