WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum is leaving the company amid arguments with parent company Facebook over data privacy and the messaging app’s business model, according to a report from The Washington Post. Koum, together with his fellow co-founder Brian Acton, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for an eye-popping sum of $19 billion, $3 billion of which consisted of Facebook stock granted to both Koum and Acton, who left the company back in September. Koum confirmed his departure in a personal Facebook post today.
Koum’s Facebook post does not mention any inner turmoil at WhatsApp or address any of The Washington Post’s reporting, which suggests Koum took issue with Facebook’s approach to data privacy and encryption:
It’s been almost a decade since Brian and I started WhatsApp, and it’s been an amazing journey with some of the best people. But it is time for me to move on. I’ve been blessed to work with such an incredibly small team and see how a crazy amount of focus can produce an app used by so many people all over the world.
I’m leaving at a time when people are using WhatsApp in more ways than I could have imagined. The team is stronger than ever and it’ll continue to do amazing things. I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee. And I’ll still be cheering WhatsApp on – just from the outside. Thanks to everyone who has made this journey possible.
In response, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to Koum in a comment saying, “Jan: I will miss working so closely with you. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done to help connect the world, and for everything you’ve taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people’s hands. Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”
Both Koum and Acton are devout privacy advocates, and both pledged to preserve the sanctity of WhatsApp when they announced its sale to Facebook four years ago, which meant the duo planned never to make integrating the product with a user’s Facebook account mandatory and said it would never share data with the parent company. WhatsApp became entirely end-to-end encrypted in April of 2016, and the company has resisted calls from government agencies to build back doors into its product even for counterterrorism and law enforcement measures.
However, Facebook pushed WhatsApp to change its terms of service last year to give the larger social network access to WhatsApp users’ phone numbers. Facebook leadership also pushed for unified profiles across its products that could be used for data mining and ad targeting, as well as a recommendation system that would suggest Facebook friends based on WhatsApp contacts.
The business model of the app also created contention between Koum and Facebook, with the latter company pushing for the elimination of the $0.99 annual subscription fee to increase user growth and looking to advertising and other methods, like letting businesses chat with customers, as potential sources of revenue. The plan to bring businesses onto the platform was especially thorny, as Facebook reportedly wanted to weaken WhatsApp encryption to let businesses read user messages, The Washington Post reports.
Koum’s departure is four years and one month since the acquisition, meaning he’s been able to fully exercise all of his stock options under a standard corporate vesting schedule. But the reasons for his leaving seem to be more idealogical than financial. Acton, who has poured $50 million of his own money into encrypted messaging app Signal, tweeted back in March, “It’s time,” along with the hashtag #DeleteFacebook, in response to the ongoing Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. So it seems both founders are fed up with Facebook.
Comments
Will they return all of Facebook money?
By Iamnew on 04.30.18 6:19pm
Will Facebook give them WhatsApp back?
By xbinkc on 04.30.18 6:48pm
ThisIsFine.jpg
By VandyImport on 04.30.18 6:35pm
Hopefully we’ll see people start moving away from WhatsApp.
By Just_Some_Nobody on 04.30.18 7:02pm
Why? Hopefully Facebook will go away instead!! Not that I’m counting on that…
By Dalien8 on 04.30.18 7:42pm
That’s like wishing Disney would collapse while buying your ticket for the Avengers.
By Chally on 04.30.18 8:49pm
with no one who can stand up against FBs tirade against privacy, Whatsapp is no longer going to be anything other than another fb chat, meaning FB can sell your message content to anyone.
By melbournian on 05.01.18 6:11am
Dont count on it. The recent Verge article about trying to leave facebook could be written for Whatsapp as well
By rattletop on 05.01.18 12:08am
Sadly won’t happen because network effects quickly create effective monopolies.
By Sidhartha on 05.01.18 2:02am
Sounds good. It‘s time to move on. There‘s a plethora of good or even better alternatives to WhatsApp these days: Telegram, Wire, Signal to only name a few. The times when only ONE messenger app ruled are definitely over.
By dhoughal on 05.01.18 7:25am
So everyone you know will just follow suit on your cue?
By llort on 05.01.18 9:24am
This is one of the situations where solutions not provided out of the box actually hurts adoption. As much as it is good that there are alternative to WhatsApp, the problem is adoption. I’ve convinced my family to use WhatsApp because everyone local and abroad uses it to communicate with family in other countries but, for the rest of my friends, some of them prefer SMS or using FB messenger. Android users don’t have a defacto E2E encryption messaging platform that is widely used and adopted but iOS does with iMessage. And I have found it difficult to sell people on using secure messaging platforms because of the ease of use of what is already available and because most of the people that i communicate with either don’t care about security, don’t understand the gravity of not caring about security, or are angry about it for a couple of weeks and get over it soon enough ie cambridge analytica.
By GolfClaps on 05.01.18 11:04am
I’m sorry, but this is all very subjective. Also, the titel of this article. I guess it’s clickbait
By IvoB1987 on 05.01.18 7:35am
It is backed up by reporting from other sources and statements from the individuals involved.
By RightBrain on 05.01.18 10:41am
not gonna happen overnight the shift but it will happen. It’s just a matter of time until better alternatives come along and with which facebook’s model of handling user data doesn’t fit in. Decentralised applications will show up soon and these giants will collapse like the ones before.
By raresh on 05.01.18 7:36am
Whatsapp is still one of the most secure and private messaging platforms, behind Signal, of course (what Whatsapp encryption utilizes.) I wish more people used Signal.
By .SKITTLE. on 05.01.18 10:23am
Meh….sellouts.
I don’t blame them for selling out. I would have sold out for billions too, but claiming they would keep their privacy policy in place after the sale was either naive or just stupid.
If you sell out to facebook, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
By Mergatroid Mania on 05.01.18 4:57pm
" Both Koum and Acton are devout privacy advocates "
Yes sure… until you give them 19 billion dollars! For that price, they didn’t object to sell themselves to Facebook which is the opposite of a privacy advocate… What a bunch of hypocrites
By Lestat1986 on 05.03.18 4:25am