Most Canadian Facebook users describe themselves as cautious about their privacy and have adjusted their settings accordingly, according to a new poll conducted for ITBusiness.ca.
A little more than half of survey respondents selected "I'm cautious about my privacy and have changed my settings, and am very selective about what information I share." The next most popular response was "I'm a little concerned about my privacy and have adjusted my privacy settings", accounted for 25 per cent.
The poll was conducted on by Delvinia Data Collection behalf of ITBusiness.ca. It surveyed 1,002 active Facebook users amongst Delvinia's AskingCanadians panel. The respondents have used Facebook within the past two months and were composed of an even male-female split.
But much of the privacy concerns raised were around Facebook's default privacy settings. Now it appears most Canadians change those defaults.
The results show cautious Canucks have recognized that its possible to enjoy privacy while still reaping the benefits of social networking, says Ann Cavoukian, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner.
A lot of negative media attention was focused around Facebook's changes at the end of last year because they appeared to weaken privacy controls, Cavoukian says. But Facebook rebounded with another update in March that strengthened privacy settings.
"Given a significant amount of media attention, as there was on this issue, and Facebook's positive response… that caught a lot of people's attention," she says.
Facebook isn't surprised by the poll results, a spokesperson tells ITBusiness.ca in an e-mail response. Recent changes made to privacy settings were intended to make the settings more simple and all users were notified about the settings at the time.
Just one in 10 survey respondents said they were not concerned about privacy and hadn't changed their default settings. Another 9 per cent of Canadians said they were "a little" concerned about privacy, but didn't know how to adjust their settings from the defaults.
More than eight out of 10 Canadians say they have made some sort of modification to their privacy settings to limit what others see on their Facebook profile.
That overall user caution is an excellent result, Cavoukian says.
A poll of 1,002 respondents is considered accurate within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.