According to a recent survey by The Washington Post, most people trust Amazon and Google with their data over Apple. The surveyed people expressed intense distrust in Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

The survey sampled 1,000+ internet users in the US to gauge their trust in platforms for “responsibly” handling their personal user data and internet browsing activity. Participants were asked to evaluate platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.

The rating scale allowed participants to state whether they trust each company “a great deal,” “a good amount,” “not much,” or “not at all.” Users could also respond that they did not have an opinion of a company’s data handling practices. Clearly, two options were net positive responses and two were net negative in nature.

Of the people surveyed, 18 percent said they trust Apple “a great deal,” while 26 percent of them said they trust the iPhone maker “a good amount.” The company’s overall net positive score was 44 percent, lagging behind Google’s 48 percent and Amazon’s 53 percent.

As much as 40 percent of all the responses for Apple and Amazon were negative. Microsoft scored 42 percent negative votes and Google, 47 percent. In total, an overwhelming 72 percent of the responses for Facebook were negative and 40 percent of all the people surveyed picked the “not at all” option when asked if they trust Facebook with their data. A separate survey last week crowned the Zuckerberg-led enterprise the worst company of 2021.

The survey also asked respondents how they felt about targeted advertising online. An overwhelming 82 percent said the ads were an annoyance, 74 percent said the ads were invasive, and a meager 27 percent found the ads helpful.

The results are surprising because 48 percent of the survey’s responders felt positive about Google, which is more than the 40 percent for Apple. This upsets the cart for the iPhone maker that publicly advocates privacy more aggressively than Google does. Do you think the survey results paint an accurate picture of public trust in Big tech? Tell us in the comments below.