Getty Images

When it comes to privacy issues, Americans’ trust in Facebook is taking a nosedive, a new poll shows.

As Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook continue to face backlash from politicians and the public over the Cambridge Analytics scandal, a poll released this weekend by Reuters shows that only 41 percent trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws.

By comparison, 47 percent of those polled say they trust Yahoo! — a site that suffered its own pair of personal data breaches in 2016 — while 60 percent trust Microsoft and 62 percent trust Google. Amazon leads the major tech companies with 66 percent.

Also Read: The 5 Biggest Threats to Facebook After the Cambridge Analytica Fiasco

In addition, a majority of those polled said they don’t like the targeted advertising that websites create with their personal data and want the government to step in and regulate Silicon Valley. Of those polled, 63 percent said they want to see “less targeted advertising” on sites they use, compared to 9 percent who say they wanted more. Meanwhile, 46 percent of adults said they want more government regulation when it comes to companies’ handling of private data, while 17 percent said they want less.

Last week, it was revealed that political data firm Cambridge Analytica — which is co-owned by former Trump White House Senior Adviser/Breitbart Chairman Steve Bannon and conservative billionaire donor Robert Mercer — was able to access the personal data of 50 million Facebook users without their permission. That data was then used to build a psychological profile of user and was purchased to aid President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

In response to this news, Facebook announced that it was banning Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its site, but that didn’t save the company from suffering a big hit to its stock and reputation. Shares in the company dropped 14 percent last week, resulting in a personal loss of $10 billion for Zuckerberg.

Also Read: Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: 'We Definitely Didn't Realize the Gravity' of User Data Leak

On Twitter, the hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending, gaining the support of some Silicon Valley magnates like Elon Musk, who announced he was deleting the Facebook pages of his companies Tesla and SpaceX. Politicians in the U.S. and U.K. voiced their outrage and have demanded that Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives testify about the data leak before Congress and Parliament.

On Sunday, Zuckerberg took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to address the leak, calling Cambridge Analytica’s actions a “breach of trust” and promising that Facebook is “now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” including reviewing all apps on the site that handled large amounts of data before the leak.

“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it,” Zuckerberg wrote. The ad had Zuckerberg’s signature on it and was placed on page 15 of the Sunday edition of the Times.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg apologises with full-page newspaper ads https://t.co/1g3ubIvS3v via @todayng pic.twitter.com/EKPfEXDHvU

– Nigeria Newsdesk (@NigeriaNewsdesk) March 25, 2018

5 'Black Mirror' Episodes Inspired by Real Life (Photos)

Netflix's "Black Mirror" is a dark satire that explores how technology affects our humanity. It makes its points through exaggeration -- but not too much exaggeration. Some of the episodes hit painfully close to home, because the situations and tech they portray aren't far off. Here are five examples.
Netflix
Season 3, Episode 3: "Shut Up and Dance"
Perhaps the most gut-wrenching episode of "Black Mirror" finds a young man racing to meet blackmailers' demands after they use his laptop's camera to catch him in a compromising position. Guess what? This has already happened in real life.
Netflix
Hackers can -- and do -- watch people on their own cameras. The U.S. Justice Department’s website tells the true story of “sextortionist” Luis Mijangos, who prosecutors accused of spying on more than 200 women through their webcams, and blackmailing some of them.

If you want to tape over your camera lens before you keep clicking through this gallery, we'll wait.
Netflix
Season 2, Episode 3: "The Waldo Moment"
A failed comedian voices a cartoon bear who berates politicians without adding anything substantive to the discussion. Voters love it.
Netflix
"So it seems to me that that's almost like a dystopian version of what comics like Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G or Robert Smigel as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog have done, which is take their humor into the real world and confront politicians and persona," said "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross in a recent interview with "Black Mirror" creator Charlie Brooker.
Season 3, Episode 1: "Nosedive"
This brilliant episode, starring Bryce Dallas-Howard, images a world in which everyone is constantly ranking each other. Rankings establish social status. Would you believe at least one country is already trying to make this a reality?
Netflix
BBC News reports that the Chinese government is developing a "social credit system" that "compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distills it into a single number ranking each citizen." One company, meanwhile, Sesame Credit, encourages its 400 million users to share their credit scores with friends and potential mates. China's biggest dating service, Baihe, promotes clients with high credit scores.
Baihe.com
Season 1, Episode 1: "National Anthem"
In the first episode of the series, a kidnapper demands that the British prime minister have sex with a pig on television if he wants to save the life of a beloved princess.

Netflix
Brooker told "Fresh Air" he was inspired by the way real politicians humiliate themselves for the amusement of voters. "I was watching things like 'I'm A Celebrity' and there were people doing these degrading things ..."
"We've got a politician called Boris Johnson in the U.K. who's persona -- popular persona is kind of as a buffoon," Brooker continued. "And he showed up on comedy panel shows as a guest and would sort of dither and say outrageous things and look a bit crazy. And what that did was it made him kind of unassailable. You know, you can't humiliate him because ... he's inoculated himself to humiliation."
Getty Images
In a bizarre twist, British Prime Minister David Cameron was accused in 2015 -- nearly four years after the "Black Mirror" episode aired -- of putting "a private part of his anatomy in a dead pig’s mouth" while a student. Cameron publicly denied it.
Season 3, Episode 4: "Men Against Fire"
This episode repeats a contested claim from the book “Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command,” by Samuel Lyman Marshall, that most soldiers deliberately avoid firing on or killing their enemies because of their fundamental empathy and humanity. In the episode, an Army outfits all its soldiers with special lenses that make them see their enemies as inhuman.
We've been doing this forever -- and haven't needed special lenses to do it. Here's a link to an article about the anti-Japanese propaganda of World War II.
If you enjoyed this gallery, check out this list of All 13 Black Mirror Episodes Ranked, from Great to Mind-Blowing ...
... and this gallery of All 13 Episodes Ranked from Eerie to Horrifying.

1 of 15

Netflix’s “Black Mirror” reflects reality — sometimes without changing a thing

Netflix's "Black Mirror" is a dark satire that explores how technology affects our humanity. It makes its points through exaggeration -- but not too much exaggeration. Some of the episodes hit painfully close to home, because the situations and tech they portray aren't far off. Here are five examples.

View In Gallery