WhatsApp’s users have surpassed two billion.
Photo: Nicolas Economou/nurphoto/Zuma PressWhatsApp has surpassed more than two billion active users, and its leader is vowing to defend its fully private form of messaging against mounting threats from governments around the world.
In announcing the milestone, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the app’s global popularity underscores why the company needs to fight for its users’ ability to communicate through encrypted channels. Even though encryption has complicated Facebook Inc.’s FB 1.76% ability to earn a return on its $21.8 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and sparked disputes with the U.S. government and others, Mr. Cathcart said users demand it.
“For all of human history, people have been able to communicate privately with each other,” he said. “And we don’t think that should go away in a modern society.”
WhatsApp leader Will Cathcart
Photo: FacebookWednesday’s disclosure was the first time in two years that the company has divulged WhatsApp’s user numbers.
Mr. Cathcart said WhatsApp would also continue on a path largely independent of parent Facebook’s core business.
In 2016, the federal government tried and failed to force Apple Inc. to provide it with access to encrypted iPhones. Since then, the encryption debate has gone global, with governments in Australia, India and the U.K. all crafting legislation that would force technology companies to give them access to encrypted data. In October, U.S. Attorney General William Barr called on Facebook to hold off on plans to encrypt all of its messaging platforms, saying that the company needed a plan to police this data to help protect against crimes including sex trafficking and terrorism.
“Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake,” Mr. Barr wrote in an open letter.
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Mr. Cathcart said WhatsApp was committed to helping out law enforcement by providing metadata that could be useful in investigations, but that end-to-end encryption was necessary to keep users safe.
“The alleged perpetrators behind the Equifax attack were, you know, members of the military of China,” he said, referring to the hack of personal and financial data of about 145 million Americans. “That targeted, as you know, every American—not specific ones.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also said he believes the benefits of encryption in strengthening privacy outweigh the drawbacks.
Building back doors into WhatsApp’s system, as governments have requested, would pose an inherently unacceptable risk, Mr. Cathcart said. Following the interview on Monday, a WhatsApp spokesman highlighted a Journal article revealing that back doors meant for law enforcement had given Huawei Technologies Co. covert access to mobile phone networks around the world.
Mr. Cathcart declined to say how his company would react, if ordered to create a back door or lose access to a major market, saying he didn’t want to “get into playing out every hypothetical,” but he noted that his company has a history of standing up for encryption.
WhatsApp remains smaller than the core Facebook platform, which boasts more than 2.5 billion monthly users, though WhatsApp is more popular outside the U.S. Overall usage statistics for the company’s combined products demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Facebook users already use WhatsApp’s encrypted messaging services.
Mr. Cathcart, 36 years old, said he came to the WhatsApp role in March after nine years at Facebook with a conviction that the company’s focus on encryption and privacy communications was “the right model” for messaging, despite the commercial and regulatory complications.
Mr. Cathcart took over WhatsApp after a turbulent period in which the company’s founders left after clashing with Facebook over whether to impose advertising and their successor, Chris Daniels, left after disagreements with Facebook management over Mr. Zuckerberg’s demand that WhatsApp become interoperable with Facebook’s other platforms.
At least for now, those areas of conflict have subsided. WhatsApp has shelved plans to introduce ads to its “status” feature, which is similar to Instagram stories, and is working at making its messaging system interoperable with Facebook’s other, still unencrypted messaging platform. Mr. Cathcart declined to discuss the status of that project, but described it as technically challenging.
Mr. Cathcart also suggested that interoperability will likely have its limits. WhatsApp has chosen not to develop many of the features that the Facebook native Messenger app has, and there is no reason to expect that interoperability would require it. Users of the two apps would still benefit from being able to send messages across Facebook’s products “even if every feature we’ve added to one of the apps isn’t available,” he said.
While Mr. Zuckerberg has also recently discussed his interest in bringing social network-like features to both WhatsApp and Messenger, Mr. Cathcart said the focus of WhatsApp’s engineering staff remains on a limited suite of products, namely private messages between people with existing connections, payments and customer-service tools for business.
“WhatsApp is best for private communication,” he said. “We’ve been willing to make product choices that skew towards the more private.”
—Robert McMillan contributed to this article.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Will Cathcart is the head of WhatsApp. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave his title as CEO. (Feb. 12, 2020)
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