WhatsApp co-founder, Jan Koum, is leaving Facebook after pushing back against privacy and encryption concerns. There were arguments about Facebook’s data privacy and the business model for the messaging app reported the Washington Post.
Koum co-founded WhatsApp with Brian Acton and they sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for a massive $19 billion. Part of that deal included $3 billion in Facebook stock for Acton and Koum with Acton leaving the company back in September and now Koum is following suit.
Koum confirmed his leaving the company in a personal Facebook post.
The post does not mention any of the issues within WhatsApp or address anything reported by The Washington Post. In his post, Koum thanked people and stated that it was his time to ‘move on’.
In response to Koum’s departure, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented stating that he will miss working with him and that he is gratefully for everything he has done.
WhatsApp Policy
The co-founders of WhatsApp confirmed that they would ensure the privacy of their app after their sale to Facebook. They also said that it would never be integrated with a Facebook user’s own account and that there would never be any sharing of data with the parent company.
WhatsApp has resisted orders from government agencies to release data and build backdoors into the app.
They also made the entire app encrypted in April 2016.
Facebook pushed WhatsApp to change their terms of service in 2017. This was done to give Facebook access to WhatsApp users mobile phone numbers. Facebook has wanted to combine profiles from both services so that they could data mine and target ads to their users. This would also suggest Facebook friends depending on a user’s WhatsApp contacts.
Facebook also pushed to get rid of the annual subscription fee initially present on WhatsApp. It was stated this was done to increase WhatsApp’s users and allow businesses to chat with customers. In the Washington Post’s report, they state that Facebook also wanted to weaken WhatsApp’s encryption so that businesses could read a user's messages.
Koum leaving is yet another hit to Facebook. After their still ongoing scandal around data privacy and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook is under heavy scrutiny to do something about is data policies. Acton who left in 2017 has tweeted with the hashtag #DeleteFacebook so it seems both of WhatsApp’s founders left for ideological reasons rather than financial ones.
