Lex Cybernetica Podcast

The departure of both WhatsApp founders from Facebook, who bought their chat app in 2014 for $19.3 billion, had to do with user rights, and in a broader view, digital rights. Jan Koum left earlier this year over disagreements with Facebook, which attempted to use users’ personal data and weaken the app’s encryption, according to the Washington Post. A few months earlier, in late 2017, Brian Acton announced leaving Whatsapp to form a new foundation. In early 2018 Acton and Moxie Marlinspike, developer of the Signal Protocol and the Signal app, announced the Signal Foundation, which Acton gave $50 milllion to establish and will executive chairman, to replace Marlinspike’s Open Whisper Systems non-profit as the developer of the privacy-oriented chat app and protocol, as well as other privacy-oriented tools. But as Facebook got embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which drew criticism and parliamentary investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, and as the new GDPR rules are making waves around the w