So it’s not entirely surprising that Jan Koum, the co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp, has left the social network giant Facebook. “It’s time to move on,” Koum writes on Facebook. “I’m taking the time to do things that I enjoy besides technology, like collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, taking care of my cars, and playing ultimate frisbee.” Mark Zuckerberg replied in a comment in the same post. “I’m thankful … for everything you’ve taught me, including about encryption and its ability to grab the power of centralized systems and return it to people. These values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp. ” Maybe it’s a bit hard to believe, though. According to the Washington Post, Koum left after misunderstandings with the Facebook administration involving user privacy, including cryptography. WhatsApp was purchased in 2014 for $22 billion. At the time, Facebook promised that it would not place ads in the app. However, a year and a half later, the social network pressed the app to change its terms of service to provide users’ phone numbers. That way, you could target ads more accurately, integrating this data into Facebook and Instagram profiles. (The European Union did not like that and fined Facebook $122 million.) In addition, Koum was angered by executives who wanted to weaken the application’s encryption. The idea was to make it easier for business-oriented WhatsApp Business to be used, and to allow multiple members of a team to use the same account. This is how Facebook plans to make money from the service, which has 1.5 billion users and is free. Sources tell TechCrunch that Koum wanted to leave the company a year ago, well before the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The other co-founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, left in September and invested $50 million in Signal, an app for encrypted messages and not only that, even he also joined the #DeleteFacebook campaign. It is unclear who will be the next WhatsApp CEO. One name for the position is Neeraj Arora, who has been in the company since 2011, well before the acquisition by Facebook. So, what do you think about this? Simply share all your views and thoughts in the comment section below.
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