5 years after Facebook’s $22 Billion Acquisition Of WhatsApp

The controversy over Mark Zuckerberg’s integration of WhatsApp into Facebook just won’t die. In 2014, when Facebook was finalizing its $22 billion acquisition of the encrypted messaging app WhatsApp, it needed to get approval from EU antitrust regulators. To prep for the meeting with about a dozen representatives from the European Competition Commission, Acton said he was instructed by Facebook to tell EU regulators that there were no plans to merge Facebook’s and WhatsApp’s data systems—which he and his cofounder Jan Koum believed was true at the time.

“I was coached to explain that it would be really difficult to merge or blend data between the two systems,” Acton said to Forbes. But shortly after, WhatsApp launched new terms of service that showed the two systems had merged.