Is Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg using Signal?

Last weekend, the personal information of more than 533 million Facebook users were leaked online. Records showed that the victims were not just from select regions, but worldwide spread across 106 countries, wherein 32 million users affected were from the US, 11 million and 6 million users in the UK, and India, respectively.

The compromised data included phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, addresses, birthdates, email IDs, and other personally identifiable details.

An interesting thing has surfaced on the web that among the millions of Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg's profile data was also compromised. Dave Walker, a Cloud Security expert shared the details on Twitter (below) and also showed a screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg's phone number.

Read | Data from 500 million Facebook accounts posted online

As part of the ethical practice of protecting the individual's right to privacy, Walker has partly covered the phone number. But, he added that Zuckerberg is on Signal, which is currently the most secured messenger app in the market. Except for the phone number for the contact list, no other personal information is tracked or stored by the Signal app.

In fact, when Facebook-owned WhatsApp revised the user privacy policy in January, many people migrated to Signal. The former gave an ultimatum to people to either agree to the new terms of service or leave the platform.

Also Read | People begin to shun WhatsApp over privacy concerns

Signal had trolled WhatsApp for its new user privacy policy and despite the animosity, it is quite ironic that the parent company's co-founder has an account on the rival platform.

It should be noted that Zuckerberg-owned companies (Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger) track and collect huge troves of user data, but the co-founder is a very private person in real life.

In one of the self-posted photos in 2016, Zuckerberg gave a glimpse of his desk. But many noticed he had put an opaque tape on his laptop's webcam. He was branded as a paranoid person, but the shocking revelation by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, about the unabetted surveillance by the US government made it necessary for others to follow Zuckerberg's practice.

Now, the recent revelation of Zuckerberg using the Signal app does not come as a surprise to media or tech critics. He is a high-profile person and we respect that he wants to keep it to himself, but we don't like the double standards of his companies which hoard customers' data to mint more revenue.

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