Apple founder warns of 'horrendous' cloud computing risks

Wozniak told an audience in Washington DC: "I really worry about everything going into the cloud. I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976, was speaking after a performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a monologue about working conditions at Apple's Chinese factories.

The play attracted controversy earlier this year when Mike Daisey, the performer, admitted that he had fabricated some of the stories in the piece. Daisey originally claimed that the stories in the monologue were taken from interviews he conducted with Chinese workers during a visit to the country in 2010.

Daisey, who has since re-worked his script, invited Wozniak to the penultimate performance of the show.

Answering questions from the audience, the 61-year-old Wozniak said: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away."

He added: "I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

Asked about Labour conditions in China, where Apple and virtually every other technology company, including Samsung, Microsoft and Sony, makes its products, Wozniak said: "We know we [customers] have a voice. We can speak but we can't act like, oh, Foxconn is bad or Apple is bad."

He said he believed conditions for Chinese workers would improve as the country grows richer.

Wozniak, who now works for memory company Fusion IO, invented the Apple I and the Apple II. He left full-time employment with the company in 1987 though he remains on the payroll.