Survey: Americans don't know that Facebook owns WhatsApp
What's the story
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's values and its position on data privacy of customers have been questioned repeatedly. In America, the growing concern over Facebook's lax data privacy policies has precipitated in thousands of Americans leaving the social media platform and Messenger in favour of WhatsApp. This begs the obvious question, do they not know that Facebook owns WhatsApp? Evidently not. Here's more.
Survey
DuckDuckGo found that over 50% of Americans had no clue
Seeing so many Americans shifting to WhatsApp in light of data privacy concerns surrounding Facebook, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo conducted a survey...and they were left bewildered. When the survey results came in, DuckDuckGo found that a whopping 50.42% of Americans had no clue that Facebook owned WhatsApp - a statistic that explained why so many Americans were jumping ship, despite them being the same ship.
Details
Details of the survey conducted by DuckDuckGo
The survey was conducted using a sample size of 1,297 randomly selected US adults who were collectively demographically similar to the total population of the US. In the survey, DuckDuckGo found that not only were 50.42% of Americans unaware of Facebook's ownership of WhatsApp, 56.38% of Americans were also unaware that Google owned navigation app Waze.
Implications
Americans are ill-equipped to take informed decisions on data privacy
If the survey is indeed reflective of the situation in America, it is a very big deal. Not only are ignorant Americans using WhatsApp and Waze without realizing that all of their data, be it photos, messages, routes, location data etc. is going to Facebook and Google respectively, it also means that a majority of Americans are not knowledgeable enough to take informed decisions about data privacy.