In a highly personal blog post, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum has moved to allay users of the highly popular messaging app over the app’s privacy concerns since its $19 billion purchase by Facebook.
Since the Facebook purchase, plenty of WhatsApp users have expressed concerns regarding their privacy and personal data. Many were worried that WhatsApp may go the way of Instagram soon after the app was purchased by Facebook, where its terms of use were modified soon after the deal, causing quite a debacle. As a result, as many as five million WhatsApp users migrated to rival messaging app Telegram the day after WhatsApp was bought over by Facebook.
Obviously, this wasn’t ideal for the now-billionaire founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum. In a blog post published on WhatsApp’s official blog, he notes: “If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.” Having grown up in Ukraine at a time when everyone lived in fear of the KGB, Koum is especially particular about privacy.
Perhaps this is why Koum also pointed out that WhatsApp “was built around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible”, where the app does not require you to include any personal information, such as your name, your email, your birthday, your location, and virtually everything else; nor are these information collected and stored by the app or the company. However, Koum stopped short of stating that conversations within WhatsApp are also not stored or accessible by anyone within the company.
It appears that both Facebook and WhatsApp are more than happy to be working independently from each other, despite the former now being the parent company. You can read the rest of the blog post on the official WhatsApp blog here.
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