WhatsApp CEO leaving Facebook
Disagreements over use of personal data may have caused rift
SAN FRANCISCO — Jan Koum, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp, says he’s leaving Facebook.
“It is time for me to move on,” Koum wrote in a Facebook post of his decision to resign from the Silicon Valley company, which bought WhatsApp four years ago. “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 will not stand for reelection to Facebook’s board of directors, the company said in a securities filing. The decision to leave was driven by disagreements over Facebook’s use of personal data and attempts to weaken the service’s use of encryption, according to the Washington Post, which cited people familiar with internal discussions. Facebook declined to comment on the reasons for the departure. It’s unclear who will replace Koum at the helm of WhatsApp or on the Facebook board.
In a comment on Koum’s Facebook post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “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.”
Zuckerberg concluded by saying: “Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”
Revelations that 87 million users had their data improperly obtained by Cambridge Analytica, the British political firm with ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has shaken consumer confidence in Facebook. The resignation of a prominent leader and board member is the latest blow to Facebook, which has taken a public beating for its handling of people’s private information in recent weeks.
During two marathon congressional hearings earlier this month, lawmakers pressed Zuckerberg on whether Facebook’s 2.2 billion users really own and control their data and what, if anything, they can do to protect it. Asked Rep. Janice Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat: “Who’s going to protect us from Facebook?”
The New York Times reported that Koum was alarmed by the vast amount of data that Facebook collects and had pushed for stronger measures to protect that data. When Koum and Brian Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for more than US$19 billion, they pledged to protect users’ data, adding encryption in 2016 so that the messaging service, unlike Facebook, collects very little in the way of personal information from its users.
Acton left the company in November and recently urged people to join the #DeleteFacebook movement on social media.
WhatsApp explains how encryption works on its website: “Privacy and security is in our DNA, which is why we have endto-end encryption. When end-toend encrypted, your messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents, status updates and calls are secured from falling into the wrong hands.”
Facebook paid a steep price for a mobile app with negligible revenue that, while widely used internationally, was less known in the United States. Yet its startling growth, faster even than Facebook’s own in its early years, caught Zuckerberg’s attention.
Zuckerberg, determined to break into the growing mobile messaging market by betting on a promising new player, had tried and failed to buy Snapchat. Since he bought WhatsApp, it has more than tripled its user count to 1.5 billion.
Koum, a self-taught programmer and college dropout, created the messaging app in 2009 with his one-time Yahoo colleague Acton. One of the main reasons the fiercely independent Koum agreed to the Facebook acquisition was to get the freedom to concentrate on building features and growing the audience without having to worry too much about making money. Wall Street swallowed the acquisition, hoping it would eventually create a new revenue source for Facebook.
Koum is famously averse to advertising, the money-minting machine for Facebook and its photo-sharing service Instagram. In 2012, he and Acton published a pledge to never become “just another ad clearinghouse.”
Koum and Acton were told WhatsApp would not have to run ads or provide user data to Facebook. But soon Facebook pressured WhatsApp to change its privacy policy to share users’ phone numbers and other information with its parent company, alarming European regulators.
Last year, the European Union fined Facebook $122 million for making “misleading” statements when it approved the WhatsApp takeover. In March, WhatsApp agreed to stop sharing data with Facebook until the two companies could do so in compliance with stricter European Union privacy rules taking effect in May.