WhatsApp: The inside story
Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 20 February 2014
Five years after launch, WhatsApp is among the world's most popular and profitable phone apps—and one which Facebook has just acquired for $16 billion, plus $3 billion for its founders and small staff.
"People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible. We don't know your name, your gender… We designed our system to be as anonymous as possible. We're not advertisement-driven so we don't need personal databases."
Now that Zucky has bought back his share of teenagers which ran away, the motives behind WhatsApp will most likely change. Facebook doesn't make money from unused data; several billion messages per day want to be tied to (and stored with) your FB profile.