There was a big story in the WSJ about the falling out between Facebook and the WhatsApp founders. That article is behind a paywall but this article goes over some of the points:
https://slate.com/business/2018/06/f...e-trusted.html
Koum the founder proudly said over and mover they didn't want to advertise and they made the deal based on promises from Zuckerberg. But really the only way they had of enforcing those promises is that if FB broke them, their FB stock vested immediately. OK, so that's great for WhatsApp people who got a lot of FB stock in the deal but how does that prevent FB from turning WhatsApp into the same kind of advertising cesspool that FB is?
And so in order to acquire WhatsApp, Zuckerberg not only had to pay a lot of money and give up a board seat to Koum; he also had to make a lot of promises. Some of those promises were even enshrined in the acquisition agreement: If Facebook imposed “monetization initiatives” like advertising onto WhatsApp, its founders’ shares would vest immediately, and they could leave without suffering any kind of financial penalty.
Thus did WhatsApp retain exactly the independence that it had been promised—until it didn’t.
Today, it seems inevitable not only that advertising will make it onto WhatsApp, but also that the advertising in question will be targeted—which is to say that when you use the app, Facebook will know exactly who you are, where you live, and what kind of products you might be interested in buying. It’s a complete repudiation of WhatsApp’s founding principles, and makes a mockery of its end-to-end encryption.
What’s more, WhatsApp’s two founders both left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, so keen were they to leave Facebook’s ad-friendly walls. (It turns out that their contractual right to being paid out in full would require them to sue for the money, and, according to the Journal, neither of them had the appetite for that.) Brian Acton resigned in September; Koum stayed on until the end of April. In leaving before November of this year, Acton gave up some $900 million; Koum gave up about $400 million. You need to be really unhappy at work if you’re willing to quit a job that’s effectively paying you some $60 million per month, and from which you basically can’t be fired.
OK they apparently gave up a lot of money to leave FB as soon as they could, but that money pales in comparison to the money they already got from FB. They left hundreds of millions on the table but they still walk away with billions.
Apparently Sandberg "leaned into" Zuckerberg and made him assimilate WhatsApp into the FB collective. How's that for girl power!
I bet there are tens of millions, if not more WhatsApp users who don't care. I'm going to Bali and notice a lot of the private drivers who cater to tourists all want to be contacted by WhatsApp. I have the app. downloaded and may even have registered my phone number, when I went on another trip to Vietnam, and found it was widely used there too. But I never ended up using it.
I don't know if Viber is any better, though I've used that to make some international long distance calls.
However, maybe the thing is to use something like Signal, unless they get big enough and get scarfed up by the likes of FB or Google. More and more, privacy is harder to preserve. I think FaceTime and iMessage are reasonably private but those won't be too popular in developing countries like Indonesia or Vietnam since Apple devices are too costly.
Skype was once the choice but that got assimilated by the Redmond Borg.