Apple's Co-Founder is Warning People to 'Get Off Facebook'
Steve Wozniak recommends most people 'figure out a way to get off' social media platform
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The co-founder of tech giant Apple Inc, Steve Wozniak, is warning people that they need to "figure out a way to get off Facebook."
Wozniak - a 69-year-old engineer and entrepreneur who founded the company, originally called Apple Computer Company, with Steve Jobs - is speaking out against Mark Zuckerberg's social network.
“There are many different kinds of people, and [for] some, the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy,” Wozniak told TMZ during an event in Washington DC over the Summer.
“But to many like myself, my recommendation is — to most people — is you should figure out a way to get off Facebook.”
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Facebook and its competitors should give users the option of privacy, suggested Wozniak.
“People think they have a level of privacy they don’t. Why don’t they give me a choice?” Wozniak tells TMZ.
“Let me pay a certain amount, and you’ll keep my data more secure and private than everybody else handing it to advertisers.”
In April 2018, Wozniak himself removed his Facebook account, according to CNBC.
“I am in the process of leaving Facebook. It’s brought me more negatives than positives,” he wrote before he deactivated his account, USA Today reported.
"Apple has more secure ways to share things about yourself. I can still deal with old school email and text messages."
“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.
“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 into devices like the Amazon Echo.
Amazon told Bloomberg at the time that employees listen to “an extremely small sample” to improve user experience.
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Fellow Apple bigwig, Tim Cook, CEO of the company, 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.
“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.”
Cook continued: “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.”
