It seems like yesterday, but no: more than eight years have passed since Facebook announced the purchase of WhatsApp for $ 19,000 million, or almost ten years if we count from the beginning of conversations between the social giant and those responsible for the courier. service.

One of them, Neeraj Arora, at the time the sales director of WhatsApp, said this through his personal Twitter account how it all went and how sorry he agreed to take over the company from FacebookBecause some of the key conditions that Mark Zuckerberg and the company made for concluding the purchase agreement were not met.

Arora reveals some of the proposals they made to Facebook before WhatsApp was initially rejected to convince them otherwise: complete independence in deciding on products for WhatsApp’s management, owns a Mountain View office and a board position for Jan Koum, then CEO of WhatsApp.

WhatsApp still did not fully trust Facebook, says Arora, and among its conditions was, in addition to not including advertising in the application, that will not collect user data or cross-platform trackingsomething that Facebook initially accepted because, among other things, plans – included as purchase proposals – was to implement endpoint encryption.

Of course, Facebook has deceived everyone since its inception – or is trying to do so – and the people of WhatsApp will be no less, although, as some critics point to these outbursts of honesty, in 2014 it was already well known what the social giant limped on foot, as if he wanted to repent after putting money in his pocket.

However, Arora is not the first former company director to speak in a similar way. A few years ago Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApplaunched a campaign against Facebook with similar allegations and of a different nature.

Fraud means everything Facebook committed to and what the original management of WhatsApp did, but also events such as the Cambridge Analitica scandal or information passed to regulators on the same WhatsApp purchase that fined them EU. , among many other smaller examples.

In short, yes, it may be that what all these millionaires demand – thanks to the sale of WhatsApp – is little media attention and that everything from the past is already known, but … But they could easily have demanded all those limits by contract? The clauses that made up the purchase agreement do not go to such depth, but it is not necessary.

However irregular or irregular, they may be, they may be right or part of it. The truth is that what happened then is a thing of the past and cannot be changed. However, this piece is an excellent opportunity to remember what WhatsApp was in its beginnings and what business model it tried to implement. Remember?

Do you remember when WhatsApp was free? Remember when WhatsApp announced that it would start charging an annual subscription of 80 cents after offering users a free year? Do you remember how some users complained that they had to pay a huge less than one euro a year to continue using the app they were stuck on all day, and how they threatened to leave it because of it?

I remember this because I’ve never used WhatsApp more than in rare cases. I remember at least verbally refusing these angry users to pay 80 cents a year for leaving the stellar app on their phones without advertising – and all that follows -. And I wonder if any of them are complaining today about how things are.