As the fallout of the Facebook privacy scandal continues to rumble on, a warning from Steve Jobs to the companies of Silicon Valley has resurfaced online and has gone viral.
Facebook is currently going through an incredibly difficult spell, with stock prices falling and many people taking part in the #DeleteFacebook challenge - a trend that has seen individuals delete their Facebook accounts in light of the data breach by the social media platform.
The boycott came after it was discovered that data from around 50 million Facebook users had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a political analytics firm which has been linked to the election of Donald Trump and the victory of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum.
In the clip below, Apple's former CEO, Steve Jobs, can be seen warning that privacy rules should be spelled out "in plain English."
Jobs, who sadly passed away in 2011, made the comments at the Wall Street Journal conference, All Things Digital, in LA. Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg was in the audience.
At the time of the conference, Facebook was in the midst of updating its privacy control and Google was being accused of intercepting US data that had been sent over using unencrypted wi-fi routers.
"Silicon Valley is not monolithic. We’ve always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley.
"Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. I’m an optimist; I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time.
"Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.
"A lot of people in the Valley think we’re really old-fashioned about this, and maybe we are, but we worry about stuff like this."
As a result of the scandal, it was revealed that Zuckerberg's net worth dropped by $5.1 billion in the space of a few hours. However, given that his net worth currently stands at around $69.5 billion, I can't imagine that he is too worried about it.
The Facebook founder made the following statement regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal:
"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.
"I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
"The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it."
Several high-profile celebrities have also adopted an "anti-Facebook" stance, with Elon Musk deleting his own Facebook page, as well as the pages for Tesla and SpaceX - of which he is CEO.
So, it turns out that Jobs was onto something when he warned about the perils of privacy and data collection. However, you're not going to delete your Facebook, are you? Where else would you see such a good collection of dog videos and hilarious memes?
