Though WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton sold his company to Facebook for a record-setting amount, he really does not like the new owner of his free messaging service. As such, this past week he—again—urged a group of Facebook users to delete their accounts on the tech giant’s social network.
At a speech to Stanford University undergraduates enrolled in a computer science course, Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp with Jan Koum in 2009, told the students that Facebook cares more about monetizing their information than it does about protecting their privacy.
Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $16 billion in what was, at the time, the largest ever acquisition of a venture-backed company. In September 2017, Acton left the company and he has been a vocal critic of Facebook since then. Last year, after Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal was revealed, Acton first called for abandoning the near-ubiquitous social media site.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
