If you're like many Americans, you're concerned about how companies like Facebook ($FB) and Amazon ($AMZN) are using your data. After all, between these two tech giants, your data could tell a nefarious third party everything from who your friends are, who you like (and don't like), what brand of toilet paper you use, who you buy gifts for, and even who you're voting for in the next election.

But fear not — Facebook and Amazon have a solution: hire people to think about consumer trust 40 hours a week.

New job listing data shows that the two companies are busy hiring people to spend all of their time thinking about how they can improve the way customers trust them.

At Facebook, jobs with the term "trust" in their descriptions began picking up last fall. In August, 86 new jobs showed up on Facebook's recruiting websites with the term. On September 3, that number hit 134. And as we lead into 2020, it seems that the term "trust" is becoming a regular occurrence in Facebook job listings, with anywhere from 75-100 such listings on a daily basis.

The uptick is more gradual and numerous over at Amazon, which, at any time, has more than 30,000 job listings on its recruiting websites for its various business units. As of this week, nearly 300 job descriptions contain the keyword "trust". Just last year, that number was 118.

While the job listings seem to suggest that the two tech giants are showing concern about how they are trusted by customers, these job listings may serve another purpose in assuring potential applicants that the company they may be considering working for can be trusted. In other words, the keywords appearing in job descriptions are just as likely there in order to attract talent and may have nothing to do with any strategic changes in the ways Amazon and Facebook are responding to consumer concern.

The answer is likely a bit of both. For instance, Amazon has been hiring for "Risk Managers, Alexa Trust" who will be charged with the unenviable task to "identify, assess, mitigate, and monitor risks that affect customer privacy and security".

Over at Facebook, a new job listing for a "Risk Analyst, Trust and Safety" in Austin or Menlo Park is looking for people who can keep an eye on "how fraud is proliferating on the WhatsApp Payments platform."

About the Data: 

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

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