WhatsApp Co-Founder Joins #DeleteFacebook Movement

The #DeleteFacebook movement just gained a notable supporter: Brian Acton, co-founder of Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

Acton and fellow WhatsApp Co-Founder Jan Koum sold their messaging app to Facebook in 2022 for $sixteen billion, becoming very rich in the process. After leaving Facebook last yr to start his own nonprofit, Acton is now speaking out against the social media behemoth in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"Information technology is fourth dimension. #deletefacebook," Acton wrote on Twitter Tuesday. "Delete and forget. It'due south time to care nearly privacy."

Acton's anti-Facebook PSA follows revelations that the London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, all-time known for its piece of work on the Donald Trump campaign, harvested the personal data of 50 1000000 Facebook users without their permission for political targeting.

Cambridge Analytica obtained the sensitive data in 2022 with the assistance of psychology professor Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, who developed a Facebook app that non just surveyed 270,000 users over the platform, but also scraped information on their Facebook friends. The 50 million raw profiles were then transferred to Cambridge Analytica, an act that violated Facebook's policies.

Facebook has since "suspended" Cambridge Analytica, Kogan, and other involved parties, but is now facing major flak for declining to forbid this from happening. The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly investigating whether the incident violated a 2022 settlement information technology reached with Facebook over earlier privacy violations.

Both Facebook and WhatsApp declined to comment about the #DeleteFacebook motility and Acton'south support of information technology.

Meanwhile, this past Nov, another ex-Facebooker, Chamath Palihapitiya, spoke out against the visitor, saying social media is corroding society and allows bad actors to "manipulate big swaths of people."

"It literally is [at] a bespeak now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social material of how society works," the former Facebook VP of User Growth said during an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "That is truly where we are."

About Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag'due south expert on fitness and smart dwelling products. Instruction yoga for near 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fettle trackers, eye rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, forcefulness training machines, treadmills, and more than. Angela as well tests smart home devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to proper noun a few.