Apple co-Founder Threatens To Leave Facebook Over Data Ownership Concerns

A lengthy article about the Facebook Terms of Service – and how it more or less gives the social network carte blanche to do what it likes with all of your data – has caught the eye of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who is not best pleased that he doesn’t appear to own his own profile picture.

The article in question is from the US edition of the Huffington Post, and breaks down a lot of the salient points of Facebook’s Data Use Policy and Terms of Service, which the overwhelming majority of us will have accepted without reading. It also goes on to elaborate on how our Facebook information is combined with some of our general internet browsing data to come up with ‘inferred’ information about you from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements.

But it’s more the question of data ownership that was ruffling Wozniak’s feathers, to the point where the Apple co-founder is considering leaving Facebook. Sharing the Huffington Post article on Facebook, he included the following message:

“Not right. My profile picture is owned by Facebook, not by myself, etc. I may not be here much longer.”

Data ownership and the issues of privacy when our personal information is posted online is becoming an increasingly sensitive subject for individuals and privacy groups alike. Here at SocialSafe we firmly believe that the individual should be the single biggest owner of their personal data, which is why we have been helping users of social networks take control of their data.

The SocialSafe application allows users to download their own copy of the information they post to social networks (updates, tweets, photos, messages, posts and more) to their own machines. Once this information is stored in the users own private, local library they can they do more with it, such as search across multiple networks, create collections, export to PDF and see their most popular content.

Looking forward, we are working on expanding SocialSafe to support personal data from all sorts of sources. To start taking back control of your personal data now, download SocialSafe for free and back up the content from your social networks.