With the #DeleteFacebook trending on Twitter, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton has joined in the campaign directed against the social media giant for letting a political data firm, Cambridge Analytica, violate the data privacy of 50 million users.
Cambridge Analytica, with links to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, has allegedly collected data from personal profiles of many Facebook users. Even deleted accounts on Facebook may still be open to harvesting of information by the social media and giant and other apps, according to a report in ANI.
Acton, whose product Whatsapp was bought by Facebook in 2014, on Wednesday morning put out a tweet saying, ‘It is time, #DeleteFacebook’. He has not disclosed yet anything more.
In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp in a deal of cash and stock worth $19 billion, Facebook’s largest acquisition. Acton quit Whatsapp in 2017 and started his own non-profit organization, Signal. He said the organisation focused on “the intersection of nonprofit, technology and communications,” according to HuffingtonPost. Also, the Signal Foundation will focus on communications privacy, he said.
The WhasApp founders Acton and Jan Koum have said the latest version of the Whatsapp is end-to-end encrypted by default. Every call you make, and every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send including group chats is going to remain private.
In a Guardian article an ex-Facebook insider has said covert data harvesting was routine for Facebook. Sandy Parakilas told Guardian that Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused”.
Parakilas was the platform operations manager at Facebook and policed data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, he said that he had warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach, according to the Guardian.
On the other hand, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg refuses to answer any questions on user data being used for political purposes. He is also being asked to provide more information by the US Congress and British parliament on the same.
