WhatsApp Founder Plans To Leave After Broad Clashes With Parent Facebook (washingtonpost.com) 29
Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporting for Washington Post: The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service's strategy and Facebook's attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions. Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more than $19 billion in 2014, also plans to step down from Facebook's board of directors, according to these people. The date of his departure isn't known. He has been informing senior executives at Facebook and WhatsApp of his decision, and in recent months has been showing up less frequently to WhatsApp's offices on Facebook's campus in Silicon Valley, according to the people. The independence and protection of its users' data is a core tenet of WhatsApp that Koum and his co-founder, Brian Acton, promised to preserve when they sold their tiny startup to Facebook. It doubled down on its pledge by adding encryption in 2016. The data clash took on additional significance in the wake of revelations in March that Facebook had allowed third parties to mishandle its users' personal information. The move comes weeks after Brian Acton, the other co-founder of WhatsApp, urged people to delete their Facebook accounts.
Broad clashes (Score:3, Informative)
Jan Koum is a broad? Or some other broad clashed with their parent which is causing Jan Koum to leave? Also, why are we telling Facebook about this in a Slashdot story headline?!
Re: (Score:2)
I was beat to it. But it was probably an intentional headline pun. Newspapers are full of them and rarely are they funny.
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It's always a tragedy to see your project, the one you raised from zero and cared for, be deeply fucked in the ass by a faceless corporation.
Much like when your daughter gets married...
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It's always a tragedy to see your project, the one you raised from zero and cared for, be deeply fucked in the ass by a faceless corporation. Much like when your daughter gets married...
I'm sure billions of dollars eases the butt hurt. But really, why is one surprised when someone wants to buy your project for a fortune and they then want to monetize it?
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Broad as in wide or varied, not females
I knew this day would come (Score:2)
WhatsApp is ubiquitous in my part of the world, but after Facebook bought them I knew that some day it would be not just a closed-source walled garden but also a panopticon. I just hoped it wouldn't be so soon.
Well I've installed Signal on my phone, now I just have to convince all of my contacts who are already comfortable with total privacy nightmares like Facebook Messenger to do the same. Let's see how many use Signal already. Start new conversation...oh it's just me :-(
Re: I knew this day would come (Score:2)
The capitalization is done wrong. But they probably had to do that. WhatSapp would sign up for a social networking service that was open about what it was?
Phone requirement... (Score:2)
I don't like how Signal and others require mobile phones. Not everyone has or wants one.
deeper question (Score:2)
what I find myself owndering is, is there something internally known that they can't talk about that is causing this exodus? or is it based all on what's already publicly known?
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I suspect it's simply that a whole bunch of engineers had managed to convince themselves they were working for a company that was doing good in the world through various mental gymnastics used to create that justification for themselves.
Now that reality has bitten, and they've seen they're not, and they've seen their entire executive level basically just lie and not give a shit about doing bad, it's shattered the false reality they created for themselves and they've realised "Shit, I'm no different to a ban
Independence of user's data? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? Just try to print out or save a chat history more than a couple days old and you'll see just how much independence a user has with their data on Whatsapp.
We have a family group where family members have chatted, shared stories, pictures, etc. around one of the growing children in our family. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to print all of that to a PDF (especially since some of those family members are no longer with us) so this little girl, when she's grown up, can see what her family were saying about her in their own voices.
It's almost impossible to do anything usable. They have an "email chat" but if you can only get the chats if you exclude media - but this won't include any text included in captions of pictures and videos. If you include media, it only goes a day or two back. Try Whatsapp Web and you can see the stuff there, but you have to keep scrolling back to the beginning, page by page, clicking on every picture to download it as you go... only to find you can't print that part of the window.
I've resorted to spending a couple hours clicking on every picture, then slowing scrolling through with a video screen-capture with the hope that some future AI will be able to pull it back apart and make a single printable document of it.
I'm desperately looking for an alternative.