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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Yan Kum is one of the most renowned Ukrainians in the world of technology, cofounder of WhatsApp, and the person who changed the way billions of people communicate every day. Behind his success in Silicon Valley lies a childhood in Fastiv, the experience of emigration, and a distinctive approach to privacy.
How Kum’s past influenced the creation of one of the world’s most popular messengers will be told by 24 Channel.
What was Yan Kum’s childhood like?
Yan Kum was born in 1976 year in Fastiv, Kyiv region. His childhood coincided with the final years of the Soviet Union. Later, Kum would call this experience one of the factors that shaped his attitude toward privacy.
In 1992 year, when Yan was 16 years old, he moved with his mother and grandmother to the United States. The family settled in Mountain View, California. The start of the new life was not easy. Kum’s mother worked as a nanny, and Yan himself worked part-time, including as a cleaner in a grocery store.
Meanwhile, he independently studied computer networks and programming. Eventually, this led him to work at Yahoo!, where he met Bryan Acton. Years later, they would together create WhatsApp.
Why did Kum talk so much about privacy?
There were still many years before WhatsApp appeared, but one thing from Kum’s Soviet childhood had already become part of his worldview – a distrust of the possibility to speak freely. In one interview in 2014 year, Kum recalled that his parents avoided talking on the phone about personal topics.
The walls had ears, and one could not speak freely,
– Kum remembered the atmosphere in which he grew up.
For a person who grew up in an environment with such an attitude toward privacy, the issue of protecting personal information later became not just a technical detail. When Kum, together with Acton, founded WhatsApp in 2009 year, the service was initially very simple.
Its main idea was convenient messaging exchange without intrusive advertising and complex features. However, privacy gradually became one of the key features of the product.
How did WhatsApp protect users’ correspondence?
In 2014 year, WhatsApp began collaborating with Open Whisper Systems – an organization that developed technologies for secure communications. Its protocol later formed the basis of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption. In 2016 year, the company announced the completion of the rollout of end-to-end encryption for messages, calls, photos, videos, and other types of communication.
How WhatsApp protected users’ correspondence / Photo: BBC
The principle is that messages are encrypted on the sender’s device and decrypted only on the recipient’s device. That is, in normal operation, even the service itself cannot read the contents of the correspondence.
Importantly! Kum did not invent end-to-end encryption and it was not created in Fastiv. The technology has a much longer history, and WhatsApp used Open Whisper Systems’ developments, in particular the protocol now known as the Signal Protocol. However, Kum’s personal experience helps explain why privacy became so important to him.
In 2016 year, presenting end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp separately emphasized the experience of its cofounder. Kum wrote that he grew up in the Soviet Union under a communist regime, where people could not speak freely, and that is why privacy was especially important to him.
How did a guy from Fastiv become a billionaire?
WhatsApp, within a few years, transformed from a small startup into one of the largest messengers in the world. In 2014 year, Facebook acquired the company for about 19 billion dollars. Kum remained in charge of WhatsApp together with the team, and later became a billionaire.
Yet even after selling the company, he continued to publicly emphasize the importance of privacy. His story presents an interesting paradox. Kum’s childhood occurred in a country where he learned from an early age that private conversation does not necessarily stay private. A few decades later, he became one of the people who helped make protected digital communication a mass phenomenon.
The technology was not created by a single personal experience or by one person. But for Kum, privacy was not just a point in technical documentation. It was something he knew from his own life. From the fastiv apartment where, as he put it, “the walls had ears,” to a messenger used by billions of people, several decades passed.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item ""Стіни мали вуха": як дитячий страх у Фастові змусив Яна Кума зашифрувати листування мільярдів". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
