The co-founder of WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook, has announced he is stepping aside.
“I've been blessed to work with such an incredibly small team and see how a crazy amount of focus can produce an app used by so many people all over the world”, Jan Koum wrote in a Facebook post.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly chimed in with warm words for a man whose business he acquired for $19bn (£13.8bn) in 2014.
“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”, Mr Zuckerberg wrote.
Neither post addressed heightened alarm about Facebook’s data privacy safeguards spurred by the disclosure that up to 87 million Facebook users saw their personal data funnelled to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
Mr Koum has spoken before about how the high premium he places on privacy, saying he was motivated to build a secure communication channel in part by his experience growing up in the Soviet Union during an era of ubiquitous surveillance.
“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”, Mr Koum wrote in a blog post after Facebook acquired WhatsApp.
“Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible”.
His departure was spurred in part by differences with Facebook over data usage and encryption, according to the Washington Post.
Fellow WhatsApp founder Brian Acton has already made his displeasure with Facebook known, sharing a #DeleteFacebook hashtag after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and writing “it is time”.
