Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak is ditching Facebook. “Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” Wozniak told USA Today via email. “The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.” He also told the newspaper that he had deactivated his account, but did not delete it to keep control over his “SteveWoz” screen name. “I don’t want someone else grabbing it, even another Steve Wozniak,” he said. Before deactivating the account, Wozniak posted a goodbye message. “It’s brought me more negatives than positives,” he wrote. Wozniak is the latest public figure to ditch the social network after a whistleblower revealed that the personal data of millions of users had been improperly shared with a third party. Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk not only quit Facebook, he also pulled the pages for Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity. Brian Acton, a cofounder of WhatsApp, urged people to delete Facebook, which bought his company for $19 billion in 2014. Playboy also deleted its Facebook presence. A number of celebrities have left Facebook as well, including comedians Will Ferrell and Jim Carrey. “We must encourage more oversight by the owners of these social media platforms,” Carrey told CNBC in February, saying he was also dumping his stock in the company. “This easy access has to be more responsibly handled. What we need now are activist investors to send a message that responsible oversight is needed. What the world needs now is capitalism with a conscience.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify in Congress this week in connection with the company’s data practices and the scandal surrounding it.
