Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes most people should remove themselves from the online social media and social networking company Facebook and has offered advice for the rival company.
“There are many different kinds of people, and (for) some, the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy,” Wozniak told website TMZ. “But to many like myself, my recommendation is — to most people — is you should figure out a way to get off Facebook.”
“People think they have a level of privacy they don’t. Why don’t they give me a choice?” – Steve Wozniak
Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs in 1976, argued that Facebook and similar companies, should provide a level of privacy for users.
“People think they have a level of privacy they don’t. Why don’t they give me a choice?” Wozniak told TMZ. “Let me pay a certain amount, and you’ll keep my data more secure and private then everybody else handing it to advertisers.”
Facebook, one of the world’s most valuable companies, claimed it had more than 2.3 billion monthly active users as of December 2018. In March, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand used Facebook to stream live footage of the attack as it unfolded. Facebook took 29 minutes to detect the livestreamed video, which was eight minutes longer than it took police to arrest the gunman. On May 2, Facebook announced its new vision with the tagline “the future is private”.
In April last year, Wozniak shut down his Facebook account.
“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,” he wrote before he deactivated his account.
“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he told USA Today in April 2018. “The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.
“I don’t think we can stop it, though. But everything about you… I mean, they can measure your heartbeat with lasers now, they can listen to you with a lot of devices. Who knows if my cellphone’s listening right now. Alexa has already been in the news a lot, ” Wozniak said.
In April, Bloomberg found thousands of Amazon employees listen to what people say when they speak to their Alexa virtual assistant, which is built in to devices like the Amazon Echo. Amazon told Bloomberg at the time that employees listen to “an extremely small sample” to improve user experience.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has also pointed fingers at much of the Silicon Valley tech cohort.
“Lately it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation – the belief you can claim credit without accepting responsibility,” Cook said in a Stanford University commencement address in June, reported The CEO Magazine.
“We see it every day now with every data breach, every privacy violation, every blind eye turned to hate speech, fake news poisoning out national conversation, the false miracles in exchange for a single drop of your blood.
“It feels a bit crazy that anyone should have to say this, but if you built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos.”
Facebook has not responded.
