Putting a man on the Moon cost less than what Facebook paid for WhatsApp, a generic chat app. So why is Facebook paying
$45 per user to gain functionality it already has?
The silly numbers look even sillier when you consider Facebook's own Messenger only lags narrowly behind WhatsApp
in terms of usage. Facebook Messenger maintains a lead in the USA, despite WhatsApp's growth.
The most likely explanation is that it's actually paying $42 for your phone book.
WhatsApp notoriously rifles through your address book, scoops up your phone numbers, and uploads them to its servers. This is something Facebook has wanted for some time since its own phone records are incomplete.
Although half of its daily users are mobile, many don't share their full contact network with Facebook, and of the desktop-only Facebook users, many don't share their telephone numbers.
In July last year Symantec found that Facebook had
slurped users' telephone numbers from its Android Facebook app. Caught red-handed, the social network said it had deleted the phone numbers extracted by this method from its servers.
Last October, in what was beginning to look like a desperation move, Facebook changed its policy to allow it
to extract its users' phone number.
Facebook admitted last summer it leaked some 6 million phone numbers passed voluntarily to the social network to other Facebook users.
Rather ominously, WhatsApp has a wretched reputation for security. It's really just a quick and dirty chat clone which borrowed much from the existing clients, and, as it was developed, BlackBerry's BBM.
Until August 2012, all chats were transmitted in plain text. It then implemented a crude and widely criticised cryptographic layer – which was compromised. In a word, its security is "
horrible".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/20/facebook_whatsapp_19bn_buy_also_45_for_your_phonebook/
. </tinfoil hat>
