Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s leaving Facebook, amid concerns about security safeguards about the personal information that users share with the social media giant.
“I am in the process of leaving Facebook. It’s brought me more negatives than positives,” Wozniak wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday. “Apple has more secure ways to share things about yourself. I can still deal with old school email and text messages.”
Later in the day, the “Woz” Facebook profile from which he’d posted the departure message was no longer accessible and appeared to have been deleted. An effort to contact Wozniak via his cellphone was unsuccessful.
The tech pioneer’s announcement marks the latest development in back-and-forth corporate sniping by tech leaders as Facebook copes with a scandal over the potential misuse of user data by political targeting firm Cambridge Analytica. In an update last week, Facebook estimated as many as 87 million people, mostly in the United States, may have had their data improperly shared.
Apple CEO Tim Cook started the unusual public criticism in late March. During a joint interview with Recode and MSNBC, he was asked what he would do about the crisis if he were in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s position.
“I wouldn’t be in the situation,” said Cook.
He added that Apple reviews apps to confirm that each one meets the privacy standards his company has required for users.
“We don’t subscribe to the view that you have to let everybody in that wants to, or if you don’t, you don’t believe in free speech,” said Cook. “We don’t believe that.”
Cook also questioned the practice of social media platforms monetizing the perosnal data of their users.
Zuckerberg hit back in a subsequent interview with Vox, calling Cook’s comments “extremely glib.”
“If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford,” said Zuckerberg.”
Championing his own company’s business model, Zuckerberg also said: “At Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use. I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people.”
Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before congressional committees in Washington this week about the Cambridge Analytica episode and Facebook’s response.
Wozniak’s latest comments aren’t the first time he’s thrown shade at social media giants. Speaking at an international business conference in Montreal last year, Wozniak said he tries to “avoid Google and Facebook.”
He cited the companies’ use of widescale data-collecting operations that are used to help sharpen ad targeting of the social media platform’s users, online magazine The Drum reported.
