Mr Jan Koun, 42, one of the founders of messaging app ‘Whatsapp’, has decided to leave Facebook. He was a member of the board of directors at Facebook. Mr. Koum associated with Facebook in 2014 when he sold Whatsapp to Facebook. Mr. Koum wrote in his social media post “ it is time for me to move on ”. He expressed his ideology for the protection of privacy of communication which drove from the era of surveillance in Soviet and importance of free speech.
At the time of merger with Facebook, Whatsapp founder wrote in his blog post “Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible, If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.” So, after much controversy of Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mr. Koum prefered to leave Facebook over compromising his ideology.
On the guarantee of anonymity, an internal person of Facebook said Mr. Koum was concerned about the amount of data Facebook collect and its privacy. He strongly advocated for the protection of user’s data. He was thinking to leave facebook since last year.
Facebook CEO wrote in his Facebook post “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done to help connect the world, and for everything you’ve taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people’s hands, Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”
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