WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton spoke earlier this week to an audience of students at Stanford University. There, he told the audience about how the decision to sell Facebook was made, and also urged students to delete their accounts on the largest social network.
Mr. Acton reportedly spoke at an undergraduate course called "Computer Science 181" along with another former Facebook employee, Ellora Israni, founder of She++. During the lesson, the creator of WhatsApp talked about why he sold his offspring and why he then left the company, and also criticized Facebook's desire to prioritize monetization over user privacy.
During his speech, he noted that big tech and social companies like Apple and Google are struggling to moderate their content. “These companies shouldn't be making those decisions,” he said. And we give them power. This is a bad part of the modern information society. We buy their products. We create accounts on these sites. Deleting Facebook would be the best solution, wouldn't it?"
Brian Acton has been a vocal critic of Facebook since leaving the company in 2017 over controversy over the social giant's push to monetize its services through active analytics and the sale of user information. This isn't the first time he's urged people to delete their accounts, as he spoke last year after the massive Cambridge Analytica scandal. Incidentally, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger also decided to leave Facebook last year, allegedly due to disagreements with management.
Source: 3dnews.ru