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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Yan Kum is one of the most famous Ukrainians in the world of technology, co-founder 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, an immigrant experience, and a special attitude toward 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 in Fastiv, Kyiv region. His childhood fell during the late years of the Soviet Union. Later, Kum himself called this experience one of the factors that shaped his attitude toward privacy.
In 1992, when Yan was 16 years old, he moved to the United States with his mother and grandmother. The family settled in Mountain View, California. The start of a new life was not easy. Kum's mother worked as a nanny, and Yan himself took on odd jobs, including as a janitor in a grocery store.
At the same time, he independently studied computer networks and programming. Later, this led him to a job at Yahoo!, where he met Bryan Acton. Years later they would build WhatsApp together.
Why did Kum talk so much about privacy?
Even though there were still many years before WhatsApp appeared, one thing from Kum's Soviet childhood had already become part of his worldview—the distrust of being able to talk freely. In one interview in 2014 year, Kum mentioned that his parents avoided discussing personal topics on the phone.
The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely,
— Kum recalled about 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 and Acton founded WhatsApp in 2009, the service was initially very simple.
Its main idea was convenient message exchange without unnecessary ads and complex features. However, privacy gradually became one of the key features of the product.
How did WhatsApp protect users' messaging?
In 2014, WhatsApp began collaborating with Open Whisper Systems—a organization that developed secure communication technologies. It was precisely its protocol that later formed the basis of WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption. In 2016, 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' messaging / Photo by BBC
The principle is that messages are encrypted on the sender's device and decrypted only on the recipient's device. So in normal operation, even the service itself cannot read the contents of the conversations.
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 a protocol now known as the Signal Protocol. However, Kum's personal experience helps understand why privacy became so important to him.
In 2016, presenting end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp separately emphasized the experience of its co-founder. Kum wrote that he grew up in the Soviet Union under a communist regime, where people could not speak freely, and that is why the issue of privacy was particularly important to him.
How did a guy from Fastiv become a billionaire?
WhatsApp over a few years transformed from a small startup into one of the world's largest messengers. In 2014, Facebook bought the company for about 19 billion dollars. Kum remained to lead WhatsApp together with the team, and later became a billionaire.
Yet even after selling the company, he continued to publicly stress the importance of privacy. His story shows an interesting paradox. Kum's childhood was spent 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 secure 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 only a point in technical documentation. It was something he knew from his own life. From the Fastiv apartment where, as he says, “the walls had ears,” to the messenger used by billions of people, several decades have 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.
