Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak quits Facebook

By Anuj Sharma - April 10, 2018
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Wozniak also compared Facebook to Apple saying “Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you. As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.” ....

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is quitting Facebook over the misuse of data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  In an email interview with USA Today, Wozniak said that Facebook monetises its users’s data and renders them “product[s]”.

“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this. The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back,” added Wozniak.

Wozniak also compared Facebook to Apple saying “Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you. As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”

Facebook is facing intense public outrage from users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal wherein the British consulting company, gained access to over 87 million user accounts data – a number much higher than the previously reported of 50 million.

Wozniak said that he would prefer to pay for Facebook rather than have his data compromised. In March, Apple CEO Tim Cook in an interview said that he wouldn’t ever have found himself in Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s position, because Apple respects its customers’ privacy.

“We don’t subscribe to the view that you have to let everybody in that wants to, or if you don’t, you don’t believe in free speech,” Cook said. “We don’t believe that.”

Last month, comedian and actor Will Ferrell decided to delete his Facebook account, which currently has over 10.1 million fans. Ferrell joins the #DeleteFacebook movement coined by WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton in a tweet on March 20 in response to news over Cambridge Analytica, which was accused of harvesting data of up to 50 million Facebook users without permission and using the data to help politicians, including US President Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign.

“I can no longer, in good conscience, use the services of a company that allowed the spread of propaganda and directly aimed it at those most vulnerable,” Ferrell wrote in a post.

Ferrell does not maintain Twitter or Instagram accounts.

Playboy also has announced that it is leaving the platform. Earlier this week, Space X CEO Elon Musk deleted verified pages of its SpaceX and electric car company Tesla while answering messages from other Twitter users.

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  • Apple
  • Facebook
  • Cambridge Analytica