More people are deleting and taking breaks from Facebook, research

With recent scandals that happened with Facebook, new research states that more people are now deleting the app or ‘taking breaks’ from it.

A new research from Pew Research Center sampled 4,594 US Facebook users aged 18 and up and observed that 42% of them have taken a break from it for ‘several weeks or more’ in the last year whereas, 26% of the respondents have deleted the mobile app from the their phones.

Pew results showed that the answers differed significantly depending on age. 44% of users aged between 19 and 29 have deleted Facebook app entirely against the 20% of people aged between 50 over 63 who did so. For users above the age of 65, the percentage dropped to 12%, reported The Verge.

Facebook sues BlackBerry for stealing its voice-message tech

Also, more than half of the respondents informed that they have readjusted their privacy setting in the past 12 months, with 54% locking their accounts recently. 64% of young users have changed their private settings, whereas only a third of those over 65 have made their accounts private because of Facebook’s many scandals.

Not long ago, Facebook was caught in serious trouble after the data breach scandal Cambridge Analytica that breached data of over 87 million users’ without their consent. This scandal seems to have made an impact on its users.

The social media firm has also introduced better privacy controls for users to manage their data. It also allowed users to download and review any data the site had collected on them. The Pew research found that one in ten of Facebook users have downloaded their personal data on Facebook, wrote Daily Mail.

“But despite their relatively small size as a share of the Facebook population, these users are highly privacy-conscious. Roughly half of the users who have downloaded their personal data from Facebook (47%) have deleted the app from their cellphone, while 79% have elected to adjust their privacy settings,” the research stated.