This is not the first time Jan Koum has stepped out to assure WhatsApp users that his company, and Facebook, won't be collecting their data. But now he's made it slightly more personal when describing the reasons why.
In a blog post on the WhatsApp website, Koum detailed how important privacy is to him. "If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it," he says. The company lost a few million users after news broke out that they sold to Facebook, and Koum believes that rumors of the company planning to sell data are simply not true. "It has the effect of scaring people into thinking we’re suddenly collecting all kinds of new data. That’s just not true, and it’s important to us that you know that," he explained, adding, "the goal [is] knowing as little about you as possible."
Yet, one of the main reasons why he's passionate about privacy is because the government listened in on phone calls all the time while he was a child in the Soviet Union. "One of my strongest memories from that time is a phrase I’d frequently hear when my mother was talking on the phone: 'This is not a phone conversation; I’ll tell you in person,'" Koum says.
"The fact that we couldn’t speak freely without the fear that our communications would be monitored by KGB is in part why we moved to the United States when I was a teenager."
[viaMashable]
