Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak renewed his criticisms of Facebook last week, telling TMZ in an interview, “my recommendation, to most people, is you should figure out a way to get off Facebook.”
Wozniak has been a critic of Facebook and their collection of private data for some time now. He continued to make his concerns public during a TMZ interview he had at the Reagan National Airport in D.C last Friday.
For some people, “the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy,” but most people should try to get off the platform, according to Wozniak. (RELATED: Facebook Feels The Pressure As Whistleblowers Step Forward)
He is worried about how much private data big tech companies are collecting and doesn’t believe they can be stopped.
“So I worry because you’re having conversations that you think are private … You’re saying words that really shouldn’t be listened to, because you don’t expect it. But there’s almost no way to stop it,” Wozniak said.
Wozniak deleted his Facebook profile more than a year ago, just three weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gizmodo reported.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was one of the biggest Facebook faced. A company with ties to Trump’s campaign gathered data from fifty million Facebook profiles, Business Insider reported.
Wozniak told USA Today he was leaving Facebook over the carelessness in which Facebook and other companies handle private information. (RELATED: Jim Carrey Urges People To Delete Facebook Over ‘Russian Interference’)
“Why don’t they give me a choice? Let me pay a certain amount, and you’ll keep my data more secure and private then everybody else handing it to advertisers,” Wozniak said in the TMZ interview.
However, around the time Wozniak left Facebook a year ago, Antonio García-Martínez, a former product manager at Facebook, said “most people don’t care about privacy.”
“Any app, and I’m using ‘Facebook’ broadly to mean whatever social media thing we have — whatever the face of social media is, people are more than willing to sacrifice this abstract notion of privacy that Brussels bureaucrats care about, in pursuit of this community thing,” García-Martínez said.
Facebook is not the only company who has faced pushback for their collection of personal data and reliance on advertisers, as Google, Twitter and even Apple itself, have come under fire for the same, if not similar criticisms. (RELATED: Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter Reveal ‘Data Transfer’ Partnership)
“If you post something and I like it, I check, I like it, but the trouble is my ‘like’ is not going to you. In my head it is, but my like is going to the advertisers,” Wozniak said.
