Co-founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, urged students at Stanford University to delete their Facebook while defending his decision to sell the app to mark Zuckerberg, and as well as his differences with Facebook.
According to Buzzfeed News, Acton made statements on Facebook while addressing a panel that involved a former Facebook software engineer, Ellora Israni at the University.
"We give them the power. That's the bad part. We buy their products. We sign up for these websites. Delete Facebook, right?" Acton said.
Acton, 47, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for $22 billion. However, he departed the company in November 2017 after more three years at the company following tensions surrounding the introduction of ads onto the messaging platform.
"At the end of the day, I sold my company. I sold my users' privacy. I made a choice and a compromise. I live with that everyday," Forbes had quoted Acton to say.
Fellow co-founder Jan Koum who also opposed the introduction of ads and the use of users data also left the company in April last year.
During Facebook's Cambridge Analytica data scandal that happened in March 2018, Acton began the #deletefacebook campaign, urging users of the social media network to delete the app.
Acton said he and Koum wanted to diversify ways to generating revenue by....maybe, charging WhatsApp users a small fee as it was it the old WhatsApp days. Acton aid they didn't want a service model that would suck up users data for ads, thereby inflicting on users privacy and security.
"WhatsApp's business model was: We'll give you service for a year for a dollar," Acton said. "It was not extraordinarily money-making, and if you have a billion users ... you're going to have $1 billion in revenue per year. That's not what Google and Facebook want. They want multibillions of dollars."