The founder of WhatsApp has today issued a strong statement reassuring users that in the wake of Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of the messaging service, data privacy remains one of the company’s highest concerns.
Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp, made the comments after a host of negative comments regarding user data were beginning to damage the company.
Yasha Levine, a reporter for PandoDaily, last month said that since Koum launched WhatsApp in the summer of 2009, the company’s privacy track record has been “horrible.”
“It’s been aggressively incompetent, careless with user data and has repeatedly failed to provide users with even the most rudimentary security measures,” Levine said. “As a result, WhatsApp left its messaging data wide open for potential surveillance and interception by intel agencies, scammers, and Internet lurkers with basic hacker skills.”
Other commentators have said that the words ‘Facebook’ and ‘privacy’ “look uncomfortable next to one another.”
However, in a blog post, Koum wrote that respect for user privacy is “coded into [WhatsApp’s DNA]” and that the app was built around the goal of knowing as little about users as possible.
“If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “Instead, we are forming a partnership that would allow us to continue operating independently and autonomously.
“Speculation into the contrary isn’t just baseless and unfounded, it’s irresponsible. It has the effect of scaring people into thinking we’re suddenly collecting all kinds of new data. That’s just not true.”
Koum referred back to his growing up in the USSR in the 1980s, in which he said that not being able to “speak freely without the fear that our communications would be monitored by KGB” was partly why he and his family later moved to the United States.
Koum added that WhatsApp’s focus remains on “delivering the promise of WhatsApp far and wide, so that people around the world have the freedom to speak their mind without fear.”
