WhatsApp: The Inside Story ⇥ wired.co.uk

A fascinating in-depth look at the founders and the genesis of WhatsApp from Wired’s David Rowan. This bit, in particular:

So have governments demanded that WhatsApp gives them access to its servers?

“There really is no key to give,” Koum says. The US National Security Agency, he insists, has no access to users’ messages. “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.”

In hindsight, this will either look like a mantra or definitive credo, or it will look foolish.