The co-founder of WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service with over 1 billion daily users, said today he will be leaving the company.
Jan Koum's exit plan comes after the clash with the parent company on WhatApp's strategy and Facebook's attempts to use its personal data and weaken its cryptography, reported the Washington Post days ago, citing people who knew about internal discussions.
“It's been nearly a decade since Brian and I started WhatsApp, and it's been a fantastic journey with some of the best people,” said Koum, CEO of WhatsApp, in a post on his Facebook page referring to co-founder Brian. Acton.
"But it's time for me to move on." He did not give a departure date and was not immediately reachable for comment.
Acton left the messaging service company in September to start a foundation after spending eight years with WhatsApp.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on Koum's post, saying he was grateful for what Koum taught him about cryptography “and his ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people's hands. These values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp. "
Facebook has fought European regulators for a plan to use WhatsApp user data, including phone numbers, to develop products and advertising targets.
Student Stanford Acton and Ukrainian immigrant Koum co-founded WhatsApp in 2009. Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 for $ 19 billion in cash and stock.
WhatsApp, a pun on the phrase "What's going on?" it has grown in popularity in part because its encrypted messages are stored on users' smartphones and not corporate servers, making the service more private.
Concerns about Facebook's handling of personal information have grown since the admission of social networks in March, according to which the data of millions of users was wrongly collected by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook has taken steps to generate revenue from WhatsApp, which unlike Facebook has no advertising.
WhatsApp management fiercely opposed the ad, stating in 2012 that they didn't want to be "just another ad clearing house" where the engineering team "spends the day optimizing data mining."
Instead, WhatsApp has charged an annual subscription of $ 1. It has come to pass that in the 2016 we have moved on to a plan to charge businesses for specialized accounts.