#DeleteFacebook Movement Grows; WhatsApp Co-Founder in Full Support
A movement calling for the boycott of the Facebook social media platform has just won over a notable in the tech space. Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, recently spoke out against Facebook after the recent scandal involving Cambridge Analytica.
WhatsApp may now be part of Facebook, with Acton and fellow co-founder Jan Koum earning about $16 billion in the process, but that's not stopping Acton from siding against the social media platform in this recent fiasco that may have ties with the last US presidential elections, as PC Mag noted.
"It is time. @deletefacebook," Acton declared on Twitter on Tuesday, March 20. It was a statement that earned support along the lines of more than 9,800 retweets and 19,000 likes as of writing.
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It's a stance that's will not be a surprise to many given the recent revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a London-based political consultancy firm, was able to harvest the personal information of 50 million Facebook users for their own use. Cambridge Analytica has also been a major player in the Donald Trump campaign last year.
The firm has been able to obtain massive amounts of personal data back in 2014 with the help of a Facebook app that harvested information not only from the 270,000 user accounts that it was able to link to but also from their Facebook friends as well.
Over at Facebook, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been busy apologizing for the fiasco. In his latest post on Facebook about the topic, Zuckerberg has also provided his account of what happened leading up to 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," he started before launching into a recap of the events.
"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that," he noted.
