Jan Koum, WhatsApp co-founder and as well as Facebook’s board of directors is leaving the company over an alleged disagreement on Facebook’s data privacy scandal practices and business policy for the app. Koum, sold his messaging app to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.
Koum announced the news of his departure in a post on his personal Facebook page. However, he did not verbalize any argument with company officials.
Koum said, “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.”
Koum also added that he will take time off “to do things I enjoy outside of technology.”
It is pertinent to mention here that Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp remains the company’s highest cost acquisition to date. Last September, Brian Acton, Koum’s co-founder at WhatsApp left Facebook to get into other ventures. And now; Jan Koum left the platform over disagreement of Facebook’s business strategies.
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On the other hand, The Washington Post reported earlier Monday that Koum was setting up to exit Whatsapp.
Whatsapp is one of the best and worldwide used messaging apps; it has 1.5 billion monthly users.
“over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption.” Facebook eliminated WhatsApp $0.99 and sought to remove encryption that scrambled personal messages.
Even though Jan didn’t declare that why he decided to leave the company other than to take “some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology”, however, as per the reports it could be linked with the both companies’ conflict of interest over the user data privacy and the demands to WhatsApp to start charging the users.
One of the WhatsApp’s key features are it’s free, end-to-end encryption no ads policy. But, on the other side, after the recent security breach of social media giant, people began to doubt the app for these services,
Over this concern of people the company responded,
“You can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product.”
However, despite the fact later on, WhatsApp did share some user data with Facebook which created more fuss and Facebook was ordered to stop collecting the data along with getting fined.
So, it seems all these disputes may likely have made Jan Koum to bid farewell to Facebook. Not to mention, Mark Zuckerberg also commented on the original post and thanked to Koum by admiring the idea of encryption and that it would “always be the heart of WhatsApp.”
