Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, says that he has deactivated his Facebook account after the revelations of data breaches. He said in an email, “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.” He said that he will prefer to pay for a service like Facebook where he knows that his privacy is respected instead of using a free service that exploits its users.
He deactivated his Facebook after posting the following message, “I am in the process of leaving Facebook. It’s brought me more negatives than positives. Apple has more secure ways to share things about yourself. I can still deal with old-school email and text messages.” Wozniak is the latest high profile figure in the tech industry to turn against Facebook. Facebook is struggling hard to regain the trust of its 2 million plus users after the scandal came forward that they misused their users’ data.
Facebook has suggested that 87 million people may have had their data improperly shared. Apple CEO Tim Cook also criticized Facebook by stating that Apple has strict requirements for third-party apps which go into the Apple store. Cook said, “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. We don’t believe that.” Cook also questioned the model of Facebook to monetizing off users data.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, replied to Cook’s criticism and said, “If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. At Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use. I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people.” The Cambridge Analytica scandal began in June 2014. A researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. The app had a lot of similarities to an app which was created at Cambridge University laboratory where Kogan was working.
Almost 270,000 people added Kogan’s app to their FB account. Kogan had access to all those people’s as well as their friend’s data as well. Kogan then supplied the user data, which was now almost 50 million people’s, to the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica. The company used the data to make 30 million ‘psychographic’ profiles of the voters. These profiles were used to influence elections in the US and the UK. Zuckerberg will testify before the congressional committee in Washington this week about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s response to it.
