Apple co-founder closing Facebook account in privacy crisis
In an email to USA Today, Wozniak said Facebook makes a lot of advertising money from personal details provided by users. He said the "profits are all based on the user's info, but the users get none of the profits back."
Wozniak said he'd rather pay for Facebook.
"Apple makes money off of good products, not off of you," he said.
In an interview late Monday in Philadelphia with The Associated Press, Wozniak said he had been thinking for a while of deleting his account and made the move after several of his trusted friends deleted their Facebook accounts last week.
It's "a big hypocrisy not respecting my privacy when (Facebook CEO Mark) Zuckerberg buys all the houses around his and all the lots around his in Hawaii for his own privacy," Wozniak said. "He knows the value of it, but he's not looking after mine."
A British data mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump's Republican presidential campaign gathered personal information from 87 million Facebook users to try to influence elections. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, has announced technical changes intended to address privacy issues.
Zuckerberg has apologized, and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, has said she's sorry the company let so many people down.
Zuckerberg will testify on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday about the company's ongoing data privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service.
Wozniak said he doesn't believe in the current system that Facebook can fix its privacy issues, saying he doesn't think Facebook is going to change its policies "for decades."
Wozniak said Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, California, has systems and policies that in many cases allow people to choose whether to share certain data. He said he doesn't foresee Apple not allowing the Facebook app to be bought or downloaded on its phones but said he does not make those decisions for the company. NEW YORK -- Facebook said it would begin notifying users Monday if their data has been swept up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, although it appears to be taking its time.
The 87 million users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica were supposed to get a detailed message on their news feeds starting on Monday. Facebook says more than 70 million of the affected users are in the US, though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the UK.
As of 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, however, there were no signs that any users have yet received that notification or a more general one Facebook said it would direct to everyone on its service. Associated Press reporters around the world have been surveying users, none of whom have reported seeing anything from Facebook. There appear to be no social media reports of notifications, and Facebook had no immediate comment on the matter.
Reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history — allegations that this Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections — Facebook is in full damage-control mode.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that he made a "huge mistake" in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook's responsibility is in the world. He's set to testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday.
In prepared remarks released by a House committee, Zuckerberg said the company has notified all users affected in the scandal. Since the remarks are for Wednesday morning, this means everyone who was affected should see a message by then.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends. In an interview aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Wylie said the true number could be even larger than 87 million.
That Facebook app, called "This is Your Digital Life," was a personality quiz created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 270,000 people to take it. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also — thanks to Facebook's loose restrictions — data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn't intended to share publicly.
Facebook later limited the data apps can access, but it was too late in this case.
Zuckerberg said Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while Kogan's app was collecting data. The company doesn't have logs going back that far, he said, so it can't know exactly how many people may have been affected.
Cambridge Analytica said in a statement last Wednesday that it had data for only 30 million Facebook users.
Facebook has also suspended two more apps in recent days because they might have misused people's data, adding to a growing list of firms being investigated by the social media company.
Facebook said CubeYou, a firm associated with the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, will be suspended after CNBC notified Facebook that CubeYou was collecting information about users through quizzes.
According to CNBC, CubeYou labeled its quizzes "for non-profit academic research" then shared user information with marketers. CNBC says CubeYou denies misusing data.
On Saturday, Facebook said it suspended AggregateIQ, a Canadian political consulting firm, amid media reports it had ties to Cambridge Analytica.
PWozniak HILADELPHIA -- Apple co-founder Steve is shutting down his Facebook account as the social media giant struggles to cope with the worst privacy crisis in its history.