Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, has advised users to delete their Facebook accounts.
Facebook is currently facing a major scandal because of the Cambridge Analytica case in which personal information belonging to 50 million Facebook accounts was leaked and used by a company to assist Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election.
Apparently, Brian Acton has started a movement called #deletefacebook and has gone viral on Twitter. This tweet started it all,
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and was purchased back in 2014 for roughly $19 billion. Following Brian Acton’s tweet, numerous users have retweeted directing their hatred at Facebook for exposing their valuable information.
Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook’s co-founder and CEO’s fortune fell by $4.9 billion when the Cambridge Analytica controversy pushed investors away. The company harvested personal data from Facebook accounts using a simple personality quiz app.
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But here’s the catch; Cambridge Analytica did not breach any servers or did something illegal to get their hands on this data – they simply exploited Facebook’s own “feature” which allows the users to share their friends’ data with an app or service without their consent.
Facebook’s shares fell around 11 percent ($57 billion in market cap) which pushed Mark Zuckerberg one place down to fifth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. At the time of writing, Zuckerberg has a total net worth of $68.6 billion – this was close to $75 billion a few weeks ago.