Behind the messy, expensive split between Facebook and WhatsApp’s founders

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg also wanted Messrs. Koum and Acton to loosen their stance on encryption to allow more “business flexibility,” according to one person familiar with the matter. One idea was to create a special channel between companies and users on WhatsApp to deal with issues such as customer-service requests, people familiar with the matter said. That setup would let companies appoint employees or bots to field inquiries from users and potentially store those messages in a decrypted state later on.

Facebook wants to weaken the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp, rendering it pretty much useless.

(Sorry for the long URL. Thought it best to include the e-mail token, it will hopefully save you from walking into a paywall.)