The former WhatsApp and Facebook exec defended the move, while simultaneously explaining his disagreement with Facebook’s business model.
“You go back to this Silicon Valley culture, and people say, ‘Well, could you have not sold?’ and the answer is no,” he said, explaining he made a “rational choice” to take “a boatload of money.”
Acton said he had a certain naivete when he sold to Facebook, as he thought he and Koum could continue to do what they were doing without getting into user data.
While most of his remarks were related to Facebook, he also mentioned the names of other tech giants, including Apple and Google, when it comes to policing user-generated content.
Facebook, meanwhile, is going to pivot to user privacy, Mark Zuckerberg announced not too long ago, which seems to be quite a challenging task, especially considering that Facebook still needs to make money from ads that run on its services. WhatsApp will get ads at some point this year, according to previous reports, but it won’t lose end-to-end encryption in the process.
Original article