Brian Acton, who cofounded WhatsApp along with Jan Koum before selling it to Facebook in 2014 for an initial $16 billion (Facebook ultimately paid around $22 billion), has taken to Twitter to tell everyone it’s time to delete Facebook.
It is time. #deletefacebook
— Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018
Acton’s tweet comes after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw up to 50 million users have their personal information used without their consent, has exploded. The scandal has wiped tens of billions off Facebook’s market cap and sparked the governments of the U.K. and the U.S. to demand that Mark Zuckerberg answer questions.
While some may say Acton’s tweet is hypocritical–after all, Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp made him a billionaire–Acton has always strongly supported user privacy, so it’s no wonder this scandal has pissed him off. He never wanted WhatsApp to make money for ads, according to TechCrunch, and he recently invested $50 million in the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit focused on privacy and data protection.
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