Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind
www.forbes.com
Facebook’s $22 billion WhatsApp purchase made Brian Acton one of the richest people in America. But his idealism clashed with Mark Zuckerberg’s financial juggernaut. For the first time, Acton explains why he left.

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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35648744

  • vas@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    I’ll copy my comment from that other thread (since I’m subscribed to both communities):

    Though it’s nice to have support from wealthy people… Building a cult around any single rich person for them to give grants to their liking is not a good idea.

    Instead I believe you need to fight for your right to have privacy. Currently it’s Europe who is at risk with ChatControl ( https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ ). At other times, it’s other countries. Some open projects (like Lemmy!) get funded by the European Commission. I believe this is a healthier approach than to believe in good rich guys who’d save you.

    • trailee@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I can agree with all that, but I don’t think there’s a Brian Acton cult. He’s also not fundamentally the creator of Signal, and he doesn’t want to be the person who figures out how to sustain it as a financially independent entity in the long term - that job is on Meredith Whittaker. I really hope that she succeeds at pioneering a business model not dependent on surveillance capitalism or beholden to corporate interests, and I’m thrilled that Acton chose to boost the project the way that he did.

      Before Acton’s departure from Meta, Signal was still chugging along with Moxie Marlinspike in charge (the real folk hero of the story). Acton was presumably rather familiar with him, since WhatsApp’s E2EE was the cryptography of Marlinspike’s design, implementation, and publication, that continues to be used today by apps like WhatsApp and Matrix. The lump sum of Acton’s support enabled growth with top-tier engineers who could be paid top-tier market rates instead of relying solely on engineers with dedication to the greater good foregoing potential massive paychecks from Big Tech.

      We should absolutely all fight for privacy rights, as you say. It’s generally very unlikely that a billionaire is going to save you, or something you care about, or be on the side of the 99%. The original article linked in the post does a fairly good job walking through how Acton became a billionaire essentially accidentally, by way of some right-place/right-time and Zuck’s greed and ambition. Most billionaires only make it through sustained rapacity, and none of them then drive their minivans to the mechanic. So I think a little appreciation is in order, but not hero worship.