select all

44 Percent of Young Americans Deleted Facebook From Their Phone

Nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past 12 months, per new numbers from Pew. Photo: Johannes Berg/Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Per new numbers out from Pew, if you’re between the ages of 18 and 29, there’s a very decent shot that you deleted the Facebook app from your phone recently. New survey numbers, done in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, show that all Americans across the board have become more leery of the social-media platform, but that hairy eye gets hairier the younger you get. While nearly two-thirds of Americans between the age of 18 and 49 changed their privacy settings within the past 12 months, only 33 percent of Americans older than 65 did.

Source: Pew Media

But it’s those mobile-app numbers that likely are causing some concern in Menlo Park: Overall, about one in four Americans say they deleted the app from their phone, and Americans across every age range seemed to be taking breaks from the world’s most popular social-media service; though, again, younger Americans were more likely to have stopped checking the service for several weeks or more within the last 12 months.

Facebook’s move to open up its data was more popular than you might expect as well. Nearly one in ten users downloaded all of their personal data, and of those, 44 percent ended up changing their privacy settings. This may or may not have been due to what they found when they started digging into what data exactly Facebook was storing about them — including every video they ever considered uploading to the service, even if they later deleted it.

Nearly Half of Young Americans Deleted Facebook’s App