All’s not well in Silicon Valley it seems and the one at the thick of things for now is social media behemoth, Facebook. In recent weeks we have heard of the saga ensuing at the social media company with serious claims of over 50 million user data were used by a London based firm Cambridge Analytica to decide election results. And the bigger news here is, its alleged Facebook knew about this.

Exposed ironically by traditional journalism, both British and American newspapers broke the story leading the trail back to the US Election which the firm targeted to have Donald Trump sworn in as President. Facebook instructed independent forensic auditors from Stroz Friedberg to screen through the data at Cambridge Analytica’s London but have since been asked to stop their activities by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, which has announced it is pursuing a warrant to conduct its own on-site investigation.

Amidst the brouhaha, former founder of Facebook owned Whatsapp has called for public to delete their account on the social site. Brian Acton co-founder of the messaging service which Mark Zuckerberg bought for US$19 Billion in 2014, told his 20,000 Twitter followers to quit Facebook with the hashtag #DeleteFacebook. The call is rather acrimonious but will it gain momentum…probably not, but Facebook users have something to think about and more so officials who let these digital company’s become so big that they’ve become untouchable with unguided principals.

Exert from Facebook’s official statement

“We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. We remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information. We also want to be clear that today when developers create apps that ask for certain information from people, we conduct a robust review to identify potential policy violations and to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data. We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. Kogan’s app would not be permitted access to detailed friends’ data today.”