"A whole new standard of low-class." That's what Facebook exec David Marcus has to say about criticism leveled at the social media platform and Mark Zuckerberg by Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, CNBC reports. In a Forbes interview, Acton says Facebook, which bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, was eager to cash in by putting ads on the messaging app and, selling businesses tools to communicate with users, and tracking users. The company was less interested in WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption that protects user privacy. "They are good businesspeople," he tells Forbes. "They just represent a set of business practices, principles, and ethics, and policies that I don't necessarily agree with." Acton left Facebook in September 2017, leaving behind some $850 million in stock option that hadn't vested yet.
In a Facebook post, which he says no one at the company asked him to write, Marcus says Acton's account differs "greatly from the reality I witnessed first-hand." There are few companies," he writes, "that empower and retain founders and their teams for as long as Facebook does." He says that Zuckerberg gave the global rollout of end-to-end encryption his "full support," and defended it when other people at Facebook pushed back. "Lastly, call me old-fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class." (More Facebook stories.)
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