Amid continuing fallout over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations of the vast reach of Facebook’s data-mining, Apple co-founder and privacy advocate Steve Wozniak said that he’s ditching the social media site over its profiting off of users’ personal information.
“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” the man known as the Woz said in an email to USA TODAY. “The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”
“Apple,” in contrast, “makes its money off of good products, not off of you,” Wozniak added. “As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”
Before deactivating his account, he said he “was surprised to see how many categories for ads and how many advertisers I had to get rid of, one at a time. I did not feel that this is what people want done to them.”
“Ads and spam are bad things these days and there are no controls over them. Or transparency,” Wozniak added.
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