One of the former top people at WhatsApp speaks about his regrets about the acquisition by Facebook, now called Meta. His story shows that WhatsApp was created with good intentions and he now calls the app a shadow of itself. He mentions empty promises that Facebook has made.
‘WhatsApp misled’
“#deletefacebook”, that’s the message WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton wrote in a tweet a year after he left. At that point, all the facts about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal were on the table. Acton is not the only one who has since regretted the acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014: Neeraj Arora was the Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp at the time and he led the negotiations with Facebook. In a series of tweets he expresses his regret about the consequences of the takeover.
Arora joined WhatsApp in 2011, two years after the app’s launch. He says that WhatsApp had averted an initial takeover proposal from Facebook in 2011, but that Facebook put forward another proposal three years later. This time, the company made it seem like a collaboration was going to be involved.
WhatsApp would have a separate office, there would never be advertising in the app, WhatsApp would make its own decisions at product level and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum joined Facebook’s board of directors. The then board of WhatsApp put a number of additional requirements on the table, including that user data is not collected and the data is not shared between different platforms. Facebook agreed.
‘Monster of Frankenstein’
“No one knew at the beginning that Facebook would evolve into the Frankenstein monster that is always hungry for more data and pays big money for it,” Arora said. He calls the current WhatsApp a shadow of what it was before. WhatsApp originally wanted to revolutionize messaging, but it would respect user privacy, the former CEO said. Users also had to pay a small amount to use WhatsApp, and Facebook initially agreed with that concept.
A year ago it became known through privacy labels in the App Store that WhatsApp collects a lot of data from users that is in principle irrelevant for the operation of the service. Although things are worse for the messenger service. “To make the tech ecosystem better, we need to talk about how perverse business models lead to products or services made with good intentions completely derailed,” concludes Neeraj Arora.
Protected by the EU
A year ago, Androidworld spoke with the Dutch security expert Donny Maasland of ESET Netherlands. He advocated being more conscious about the way we use WhatsApp. The Dutch movement #Clear Signal does not fully agree with that approach and called on Androidworld to switch to Signal en masse instead.
However, soon your friends will no longer have to use Signal if you want to reach them via the app. The European Digital Markets Act should make it possible for you to send a message to a user on WhatsApp with Signal or Telegram, for example. Do you still use WhatsApp and are you concerned about the data that Facebook collects about you and uses it for advertisements? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.
– Thanks for information from Androidworld. Source