WhatsApp founder Jan Koum resigns as Facebook’s woes continue

Now Facebook doesn’t exactly have a great track record with that either after it announced less than two years after buying WhatsApp it would start sharing your phone number with Facebook in order to match up the accounts. Currently, the content of messages sent by its one billion-plus users every day are only accessible to the sender and receiver.

Yet despite all this, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on the planet with over 1.5 billion users.

As the report in the Washington Post noted, Koum’s position is unique among the founders of companies purchased by Facebook, as he is the only member to have served on Facebook’s board.

Jan Koum is understood to be leaving Facebook because of its plans to harvest WhatsApp data.

In a blog post written when Facebook made public the biggest acquisition in its history, Koum famously wrote that the deal wouldn’t have been completed if WhatsApp “had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product”. And now he has finally announced his plans of leaving the company. I’m leaving at a time when people use Whatsapp to a greater extent than I could imagine.

Jan Koum who co-founded the Facebook-owned messaging app 9 years ago is having disagreements with Facebook over privacy and encryption. These steps which Facebook has been taking are simply taking away the values of WhatsApp.

Also, WhatsApp’s foundational feature is its end-to-end encryption, meaning communications are part of a system where only the participants can read it. Encryption is the process of transforming data into complex codes to automatically lock the information and essentially obstruct unauthorized access. However, Facebook had been more focused on unifying all its services. Koum’s exit comes after almost 10 years of running the reigns at what is now the world’s largest cross-platform instant messaging application with over a billion users and a time when WhatsApp’s parent is undergoing a lot of scrutinies.

In an update to its terms of service, WhatsApp said the minimum age for users outside the European Union was still 13 years.

How and if WhatsApp would make money was left an open question. But the Post further revealed the reason behind this high-profile management rejig at Facebook.

Koum will also leave Facebook’s board of directors, the company confirmed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The app started in 2009, and then was sold to Facebook in 2014 for $19B.

Apparently, he clashed with Facebook over encryption as well, as Facebook wants to weaken encryption so that businesses using the chat app for commercial purposes could add various tools to the customer experience.