Despite their contributions to him, Brian Acton thinks it’s time for Facebook to go.
In a rare public appearance last Wednesday, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton encouraged students at Stanford University to delete their Facebook accounts.
“These companies are not equipped to make these decisions,” Acton said during the talk, adding that plenty of major companies like Google, Apple, or Facebook have little to no control over the content that can be found within their respective social networking sites. “And we give them the power. That’s the bad part. We buy their products. We sign up for these websites. Delete Facebook, right?”
Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, saying that these issues are the main reasons why he left the company in the first place. Since 2017, he has been criticizing Facebook over its decision to monetize its services rather than protect user privacy.
This isn’t the first time that Acton has urged people to delete their social media accounts. He also encouraged people last year to delete their accounts after the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal. During the scandal, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had actually harvested personal information from millions of Facebook users without getting their consent, in order to use that data for political purposes.
