What does WhatsApp’s co-founder Brian Acton, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Playboy’s CEO Cooper Hefner, and now Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak all have in common? They’ve all left Facebook in some capacity.
Wozniak, speaking to USA Today, seemingly no longer wants to be the “product” that Facebook sells.
No ad to show here.
“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he told the publication in an email this weekend. “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,” Wozniak added.
And he isn’t alone in this stance either.
Apple CEO Tim Cook also criticised Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg for allowing the Cambridge Analytica scandal to occur in the first place.
Zuckerberg recently stated that some 87-million Facebook users could’ve been affected by the scandal, more than the 50-million initially estimated. Additionally, nearly all of Facebook’s users could’ve had an app siphon off their user data without their consent at some point during their Facebook lives.
The tech elite’s #DeleteFacebook timeline
Steve Wozniak is just one of many high-profile Facebook users who have criticised the social network, threatened to leave it, or have deleted their profiles or company pages since the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light in March.
20 March
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton was the first to speak out, just three days after the news broke.
Although WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, the company has claimed that it garners “very little data” from its users.
It is time. #deletefacebook
— Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018
23 March
Elon Musk, after replying to Acton with a snarky “What’s Facebook?” tweet, was asked to delete the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla by other Twitter users.
He obliged.
I didn’t realize there was one. Will do.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018
Definitely. Looks lame anyway.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018
28 March
Playboy CEO Cooper Hefner announced the company was stepping away from the social network criticising its role in the data scandal, in addition to its oppressive stance on sexual content.
We are stepping away from Facebook pic.twitter.com/4yFIdk2eDE
— Cooper Hefner (@cooperhefner) March 28, 2018
Feature image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC 2.0 BY-SA, resized)
