'Delete Facebook now': WhatsApp co-founder gives a talk at Stanford
'Delete
Facebook now': WhatsApp co-founder gives a talk at Stanford
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton
advised an undergraduate class at his alma mater, Stanford, on Wednesday to
delete Facebook, BuzzFeed News reports.
Acton, who sold his company to
Facebook for $19 billion, criticized Mark Zuckerberg of abusing users' privacy
by allowing ads on Facebook.
This isn't the first time Acton has
called on people to disengage from Facebook. Last year, he showed support on
Twitter for a #DeleteFacebook social media campaign triggered by the data
privacy scandal started when news broke Cambridge Analytica, the political
marketing firm linked to the Trump campaign, had inappropriately obtained the
private information of 87 million Facebook users.
"It is time.
#deletefacebook," Brian Acton said in a tweet, using the hashtag
protesting the handling of the crisis.
Acton is now the head of non-profit
Signal, a rival messaging app that focuses on security and privacy.
He and his cofounder, Jan Koum, sold
to Facebook in 2014 and in his talk at Stanford Acton defended his decision to
sell.
"I had 50 employees, and I had
to think about them and the money they would make from this sale," he
said. "I had to think about our investors and I had to think about my
minority stake. I didn't have the full clout to say no if I wanted to."
Acton and Koum have both revealed
publicly many times that they disagreed with Zuckerberg over introducing
advertising on WhatsApp. On Wednesday, Acton said they pushed for a model that
would charge users $1 a year instead of using an advertising model for profit.
'It was not extraordinarily
money-making, and if you have a billion users ... you're going to have $1
billion in revenue per year," he said. "That's not what Google and
Facebook want. They want multibillions of dollars."
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