Here's Why Whatsapp Co-Founder Brian Acton Was Asking Everyone To Delete Facebook

Even as Facebook is in the eye of a massive storm that's refusing to go away, the social media giant's nightmares just got a lot more worse.

You see, a lot of people are unhappy with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, including the co-founder of Whatsapp Brian Acton who didn't mince his words about how he felt.

reuters

Taking to Twitter just a few hours earlier, this is what the co-founder of Whatsapp Brian Acton had to say about Facebook.

Why is this message so significant? Because Acton has worked with Facebook very closely. He sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, and continued to be associated with Facebook after the sale, heading the Whatsapp division inside the social media giant.

But he quit from his role at Whatsapp and Facebook earlier this year to work at Signal messaging app, which has pretty much become the gold standard of encrypted, highly secure messaging -- incidentally Facebook Messenger's encryption is derived from Signal's technology.

The reason behind #DeleteFacebook

Acton's tweet is the most high profile addition to the hundreds of thousands of voices joining the #DeleteFacebook hashtag that's trending on Twitter.  Lot of Facebook users are feeling violated about Facebook's policies that handle user data and how that data is shared with third-party developers.

Facebook is facing intense backlash from users and government agencies after reports emerged that a political data analysis company Cambridge Analytica accessed 50 million Facebook users' data without their permission.

Over the last two days, Facebook's shares have fallen over 10 per cent after reports that British firm Cambridge Analytica, a consultant for now US President Donald Trump's Presidential campaign, used data, including user likes, inappropriately obtained from Facebook users to try and influence the elections held in November 2016.

As pressure keeps mounting, Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg are yet to make any public comments about this whole issue. According to an AFP report, the social media giant has currently hired a digital forensics firm to investigate claims of the data leak further.