For Forbes, the co-founder of WhatsApp, of course, Brian Acton recently revealed the reasons why he left the social network giant Facebook, the company that bought the well-known instant messaging application, of course, WhatsApp in September 2017. According to him, the decision cost him $850 million in stock, which would be paid if he remained with the company for another year. The businessman lamented the sale of WhatsApp. “I’ve sold my users’ privacy for a greater benefit. I made the choice and a commitment. And I live with it every day,” Acton said during the interview. He says that after the sale, he did not agree to two plans of the social network giant Facebook to monetize the application. The company intended to display ads and allow communication between companies and their consumers. However, we all know very well that the social network giant Facebook still wants to display ads within WhatsApp Status. For Acton, the plan may break some kind of agreement that the application has with its users. The social network giant Facebook also wants to offer tools for companies to get in touch with potential customers. This would involve performance analysis solutions for brands. However, encryption is a deadlock, since messages cannot be accessed. According to WhatsApp co-founder, this plan has not been abandoned and the social network giant Facebook is still seeking out to offer the analysis to other companies. However, he believes users’ privacy is at stake. Hence, the co-founder of WhatsApp, Biran Acton suggested others simply to exit to monetize the app. One of them involved the collection according to the number of messages sent by the companies, which should be adopted.
WhatsApp integration with Facebook
One of the controversies surrounding the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook was the integration between the two platforms. Acton says he has not heard of Zuckerberg’s plans to merge the information until the deal is approved. He recalls a conference with representatives of the European Commission: “I was instructed to explain that it would be really difficult to merge data between the two systems.” A year and a half after the purchase, the terms of WhatsApp have been updated and have opened the gap for Facebook to merge profiles of the two networks. “I think everyone was playing because they thought the European Union might have forgotten about having spent enough time,” says Acton. That’s not what happened: Facebook was forced to pay $122 million for passing incorrect or misleading information about the deal. A year later, Jan Koum, the other co-founder of WhatsApp, decided to leave Facebook. At the time, he said it was “time to move on”. Acton, for its part, invested $50 million in Signal, another messaging application that has as its main attraction the focus on information security. The entrepreneur says the service wants to make private communication “accessible and universal.” So, what do you think about this? Simply share all your views and thoughts in the comment section below.
