Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, has deactivated his Facebook account following the latest privacy crisis rocking the social media platform.
It’s been almost three weeks since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and Facebook users began to truly understand what Facebook has been doing with their data.
Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has been frantically trying to reassure the public that Facebook knows it “needs to do a better job” but observers like Wozniak believes there’s little the social network can do because its fundamental business model is the problem.
In an email to USA Today, Wozniak said Facebook makes a lot of advertising money from personal details provided by users. He said the “profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”
Wozniak said he’d rather pay for Facebook. “Apple makes money off of good products, not off of you,” he said.
In an interview late Monday in Philadelphia with The Associated Press, Wozniak said he had been thinking for a while of deleting his account and made the move after several of his trusted friends deleted their Facebook accounts last week.
It’s “a big hypocrisy not respecting my privacy when (Facebook CEO Mark) Zuckerberg buys all the houses around his and all the lots around his in Hawaii for his own privacy. He knows the value of it, but he’s not looking after mine” Wozniak said.
A British data mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s Republican presidential campaign gathered personal information from 87 million Facebook users to try to influence elections.
Zuckerberg has apologized, and Facebook’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, has said she’s sorry the company let so many people down.
Zuckerberg has been to the Capitol Hill today and will go again, tomorrow, Wednesday to apologise and talk about the company’s ongoing data privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service. (AFP)
