Steve Wozniak is leaving Facebook over concerns about the social media's company's troubles protecting the privacy of its users that were heightened by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Apple cofounder told USA Today on Sunday.
Wozniak told the newspaper that while Facebook and similar social media websites are free for users, those companies sell advertising based on the demographics of users.
"Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this," Wozniak said in a statement to USA Today. "The profits are all based on the user's info, but the users get none of the profits back.
"Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you. As they say, with Facebook, you are the product," he added.
Current Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook started in on the tech criticism of Facebook in March during a joint interview with Recode and MSNBC, according to USA Today.
Cook was asked about Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and Cambridge Analytica, the British firm that was hired by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Facebook was accused of unwittingly sharing information of more than 87 million of its users with the company, per NBC News.
When asked in that interview what he would do in Zuckerberg's situation, Cook said, "I wouldn't be in that situation," according to Recode.
Cook later said, according Recode: "The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer — if our customer was our product. We've elected not to do that."
Zuckerberg, who is set to testify in front of Congress this week about the scandal, pushed back in an interview with the website Vox.
"You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth," Zuckerberg told Vox. "The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay.
And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people. … But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford."
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