By leaving Facebook to play Frisbee, WhatsApp co-founder to lose $1 billion

Jan Koum’s exit from Facebook Inc. could prove costly. A speedy departure may prevent him from collecting as much as $1 billion in stock awards.

The chief executive officer of messaging unit WhatsApp confirmed in a Facebook post-Monday afternoon that he was leaving the company. The announcement comes before the final three vesting dates of restricted stock unit awards tied to Facebook’s $22 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.

Koum, 42, got about 24.9 million restricted shares as part of the deal. The stock vests in increments until late 2018, with 1.9 million shares due to vest in mid-May and mid-August, plus a final tranche of 2.1 million set to be issued in November.

The awards are contingent on him still being employed through those dates. He would forfeit 5.8 million shares, worth $997.5 million as of Monday’s close, if he left before May 15, unless his exit is categorized as an involuntary termination or a good-reason resignation, regulatory filings show.

Facebook trying to weaken WhatsApp privacy? Co-founder Jan Koum quits

The co-founder of WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook Inc with more than 1 billion daily users, said on Monday he was leaving the company, in a loss of one of the strongest advocates for privacy inside Facebook.

Jan Koum's plan to exit comes after clashing with the parent company over WhatApp's strategy and Facebook's attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, the Washington Post earlier reported, citing people familiar with the internal discussions.

"It's been almost a decade since Brian and I started WhatsApp, and it's been an amazing journey with some of the best people," Koum, WhatsApp's chief executive, said in a post on his Facebook page referring to co-founder Brian Acton.

"But it is time for me to move on." He did not give a date for his departure and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Acton left the messaging service company in September to start a foundation, after spending eight years with WhatsApp.

What Mark Zuckerberg didn't say about what Facebook knows about you

If there’s one thing we learned from the past week’s marathon congressional inquisition of Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, it’s this: The inner workings of Facebook’s data-harvesting behemoth are so byzantine, that in some ways Mr Zuckerberg is just as confused as the rest of us about how it all works.

In his testimony before the US House of Representatives Wednesday, Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook doesn’t store a history of websites its users have visited.

Mr Zuckerberg later corrected himself, saying Facebook does in fact store a list of visited websites that include Facebook’s tracking code. He added that the list is held temporarily before being converted into “a set of ad interests.”

When testifying before the Senate Tuesday, Mr Zuckerberg said, “I think everyone should have control over how their information is used.” He also said, “You have full access to understand all—every piece of information that Facebook might know about you—and you can get rid of all of it.”

Cambridge Analytica scandal: EU asks Facebook to 'cooperate fully'

The European Commission on Friday called on Facebook to "cooperate fully" with investigators into the scandal over the harvesting of personal data of millions of users which were then shared with the British political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook has admitted up to 2.7 million people in the European Union may have been caught in the scandal.

And last week the EU had said that its justice commissioner, Vera Jourova, would hold phone talks with Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to discuss what the company is doing to address the breach, which may have affected 87 million people around the world.
Confirming that a telephone conversation took place earlier today, Jourova said that she "urged Facebook to fully cooperate with the European investigators, also on the highest level from the company." The discussion with Sandberg had been "constructive and open," Jourova said.

Zuckerberg's Congress testimony is over, but scrutiny is just ramping up

For 14 years, Mark Zuckerberg was free to use any means he could imagine to build his social network into an internet and advertising colossus with tens of billions of dollars in revenue. Now Congress is waking up to what that freedom meant for Facebook Inc users.

The chief executive officer’s first congressional testimony -- roughly 10 hours answering to US Senate and House lawmakers over the past two days -- kick-started a new era of government scrutiny of Facebook, whose swift emergence outpaced any regulations on the books at its founding. While questions ranged from data privacy to prescription drug sales to employee diversity, most lines of inquiry highlighted the challenge of trying to grasp and confront Facebook’s immense power in consumers’ lives, in ways most of its users don’t completely understand.

Congress is looking more broadly at Facebook’s reach, beyond the user data leaks that brought Zuckerberg to testify. While investors were cheered by Zuckerberg’s calm responses to barrages of questions, many lawmakers have begun to express outrage at the ways the company has run its business for years. There were dozens of unanswered or follow-up questions that the executive promised his team would respond to later, and some of his talking points aren’t likely to hold up to future analysis.