WhatsApp co-founder wants us to delete the Facebook app

WhatsApp, as you know, is owned by Facebook. Back in 2014, the social media giant bought the messaging service for a whopping $16 billion. WhatsApp is still lead by co-founder Jan Koum, but Brian Acton left the company earlier this year to start his own non-profit foundation. But that doesn't stop him from taking a dig at the mother company.

Acton in his latest tweet urged the users to delete Facebook. "It is time," Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook. Both WhatsApp and Acton are yet to comment on the matter.

Acton who's worth $6.5 billion invested $50 million into Signal, a standalone alternative to WhatsApp. The tweet came five days after Facebook witnessed a decline in shares due to the data privacy revelations by Cambridge Analytica.

Acton isn't the first person that expressed unease after cutting ties with Facebook. In 2017, former head of growth Chamath Palihapitiya created ripples after saying "we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works."

According to a report by TechCrunch, WhatsApp will not share data with its parent company Facebook unless the data sharing process doesn't violate the EU's upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The news comes after WhatsApp submitted the Android beta version 2.18.57 to the Google Play Beta program. The Terms of Services (ToS) of the update shows that the messaging platform will soon start the process of sharing the user data with Facebook.

Late last year, France's privacy watchdog had also issued a formal notice to WhatsApp, asking the messaging app to stop sharing user data with its parent company Facebook within a month. To Mark Zuckerberg's relief, both the France and UK rulings on WhatsApp and Facebook are still just country level. However, when the GDPR comes into effect in May, similar privacy-protecting laws will apply in all the regions under EU.

WhatsApp live location sharing feature to Android and iOS

WhatsApp had released a new version of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy where it explained that "from now on, its users' data are transferred to Facebook for three purposes: targeted advertising, security and evaluation and improvement of services (business intelligence).