Last week, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton had a message for Facebook users following the Cambridge Analytica events. He tweeted: "It is time. #deletefacebook". WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for US$19 billion (€15.4 billion).
Acton himself left Facebook last year to focus on messaging app Signal. Should we be thinking about deleting WhatsApp too? In May 2017, Facebook was fined US$122 million by the EU for “misleading information” about the WhatsApp acquisition, implying that it could not link user profiles across the two platforms when it could and did.
Signal might be the better option if you still want a solid messaging app but one that is open source, free, has secure end-to-end encryption for private conversations that will not be monitored by the app, whose underlying technology is endorsed by Edward Snowden, and is not owned by Facebook. It does all the same things other messaging apps do: group, text, voice, and video with the ability to attach images and documents. The only roadblock is convincing friends and family to migrate.
