Old But Gold: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind

Probably more relevant today than when the article was first published 7 years ago, this is the guy who went on to make Signal possible in its current form.

If walking away from $850 million feels like penance, Acton has gone further. He has supercharged a small messaging app, Signal, run by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike with a mission to put users before profit, giving it $50 million and turning it into a foundation. Now he’s working with the same people who built the opensource encryption protocol that is part of Signal and protects WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users and that also sits as an option on Facebook Messenger, Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Allo messenger. Essentially, he’s re-creating WhatsApp in the pure, idealized form it started: free messages and calls, with end-to-end encryption and no obligations to ad platforms.

Acton says that Signal now has unspecified “millions” of users, with a goal to make “private communication accessible and ubiquitous.” While Acton’s $50 million should take it a long way—Signal could afford only five full-time engineers until he came along—the foundation wants to figure out a perpetual business model, whether that means taking corporate donations like Wikipedia or partnering with a larger company, as Firefox has done with Google.

None of the other private messaging services that people like to talk about on Lemmy have a solidly moral billionaire on their side.

First time that I read the article (it's a few years old).

What stands out to me is the following:

a) the one thing keeping heavy monitization and fully eroding of User privacy within the app at bay is the strong encryption - if Facebook finds a way to get rid of it (or maybe they are contempt with the ways they found to link Metadata to users?), that's a step they are going to do. b) the moment one sells the company/ownership switches to a publicly traded company, even when you have employees fighting against it, it goes downhill from there. Even if you are competent and have the willpower and dedication and standing to advocate for the right path, you mitigate at best - and only for some time.
c) and finally the big force in all of that: in the article you'll find Zuckerberg communicating to the WhatsApp that Wallstreet expects growth. Growth that they need to provide by compromising WhatsApps integrity.

Once you are part of the publicy traded world, agency and independency is lost to an extend that is not recoverable. I see it time and time again.

This might be a good article (and/or a good guy), please don't get me wrong!

But Fuck Forbes, I hate the intro so much:

Brian Acton, 46, sits in a cafe of the glitzy Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, California, and the only way you’d guess he might be worth $3.6 billion is the $20 tip he briskly leaves for his coffee. Sturdily built and wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt from a WhatsApp corporate event, he’s determined to avoid the trappings of wealth

"Wealth is not as liberating as it seems"

Ok, give it to me please? Money would literally solve all my current issues.