Apple’s co-founder, Steve Wozniak, has stated that he has left Facebook over the data collection controversy that the company is currently going through. Wozniak is leaving Facebook over the fact that the company has been careless with the information it collects on its users. Stating in an email that “users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this. The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.” Which is absolutely true, and that’s how Facebook’s business model has been. Of course, Facebook isn’t alone here, Google and other social media networks do similar things. But they, appear, to be more careful with data collected by users.
Facebook has been in the middle of a data collection scandal for nearly a month now. It all started with Cambridge Analytica when a whistleblower (a former Cambridge Analytica employee) made the issue public. Since then, two other companies have surfaced doing the exact same thing – which have since been suspended from using Facebook’s platform. The company has lost billions in its market cap, dropping its stock price from the $180s to around the $150s now. On top of that, Facebook’s CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is heading to the US Congress this week to testify in front of three congressional committees. Facebook is also being investigated in other countries including Australia, Canada and the UK.
Wozniak was likely not the first one to leave Facebook over this data scandal, especially since the #DeleteFacebook hashtag was trending late last month and into April. However, Facebook has said that it has not seen a big hit in advertising dollars or traffic since this whole scandal was made public. That’s good news for shareholders, but we’ll see if that is really true when Facebook announces earnings on April 25th. Now Wozniak did help create Apple with Steve Jobs, and Apple has been taking jabs at Facebook over this scandal, saying that it sells good products, while with Facebook, the user is the product. Which is very true, and it means that Facebook should be doing a better job at protecting the product.