Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told USA Today that he’s planning on deleting his Facebook account, due to the social network’s lack of respect for their users’ privacy or data.
“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he 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.”
The Woz continued, praising the company he helped co-found, and its privacy policies.
“Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you,” Wozniak said. “As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”
Wozniak said he would rather pay a fee to Facebook than have the company use his personal information for advertisers.
Wozniak’s “you are the product” reference is is to the argument that if you take advantage of free services such as Facebook or Google, you are in reality paying for those services with your personal data, as those companies track their users’ browsing and usage activities, selling that information to the highest bidder.
In contrast, while Apple users pay a lot upfront for their iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other Apple products, they don’t sell your information, or use it for advertising purposes.
Wozniak’s comments come in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it has been revealed that the company had improperly obtained data on as many as 87 million Facebook users, possibly more.