Steve Wozniak Leaves Facebook, Deactivates Account

In the wake of a huge privacy violation, several high-profile Facebook users are abandoning the social media platform. This morning, Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak announced he was leaving the site, as well as deactivating his account.

The Woz sent an email to USA Today citing his reasons for leaving, most of them centering on the estimated 87 million Facebook users whose personal information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Reportedly starting today, the affected users should be getting a message in their news feeds informing them of the data breach. There will also be a link sent to the 2.2 billion Facebook users to review apps linked to accounts and what information is actually available to those apps.

While USA Today didn’t publish the full Woz email, they did note some main points:

• “I am in the process of leaving Facebook. It’s brought me more negatives than positives. Apple has more secure ways to share things about yourself. I can still deal with old school email and text messages,” Wozniak posted on Sunday.
• “I was surprised to see how many categories for ads and how many advertisers I had to get rid of, one at a time. I did not feel that this is what people want done to them,” he said. “Ads and spam are bad things these days and there are no controls over them. Or transparency.”
• “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.”
• “Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you,” Wozniak said. “As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”

Earlier today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers including members of committees holding hearings this week on the Cambridge Analytica issues.