Building WhatsApp for 3 Billion Users with Alice Newton-Rex
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Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to message the people in their life, and they should be able to carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in doing so. But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close friends and family. That's why we're doing things like business messaging. That's why we've built new features like channels and status and updates tabs separate from your personal chats. We think that if we carry on getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more of these features that users want.

Welcome to Analyze Asia, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business, technology and media in Asia. I'm Bernard Leong and I often say that in a world where privacy is increasingly scrutinized,

The true differentiator for platforms is how they balance innovation with trust. How do we continue to evolve messaging in a way that is both intelligent and private? With me today, Alice Newton-Rex, Vice President and Head of Product for WhatsApp, to dive into this very question. We'll explore how WhatsApp is being used by, I think, probably

If I get my statistics wrong, it's 2 billion people globally. It's shaping the future of private messaging. Leveraging, of course, now Meta AI and also empowering business across emerging markets. Alice, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you so much for having me on. Yeah. Well, it's of course early morning in Singapore. So in preparing for this interview, I found out that we're both alumni from Cambridge University. So in UK, not the other ones in Boston. So to start with the origin story, how do you begin your journey? Yeah.

Well, when I was at Cambridge, I studied classics, Latin and ancient Greek, as well as the culture of those two civilizations. And I think learning the ancient languages was a really good background for the rigors of later learning coding languages. And learning about how people lived in societies very different from my own was an important grounding in the empathy that you need to build products that will serve people in different countries all around the world. I think lots of people underestimate the benefits of an education in the humanities, even if you're planning to have a technical career.

After my undergraduate degree, I did a year-long fellowship at Harvard where I learned to code, among other things, and worked with a group at MIT developing a mobile health app for use in low-income settings. Then I came back to the UK and started my career at the UK's then new government digital service, where we set out to build public services online that was well-designed and easy to use as the best private sector digital services.

And after that, I joined a Series A startup called World Remit, an app for international money transfer, mostly for migrants sending money from the US and Europe back to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Over the next five years, I led the product and design teams as we grew the service to more than 150 countries around the world and the business to be worth billions of dollars. And then I joined WhatsApp, initially to lead their product team in the UK. WhatsApp has two engineering sites in California and London. Wow.

So that was how you ended up in WhatsApp and subsequently from there, you now leading product, right? So of course, given that you've gone through the government side and then you doing a lot of work relating to messaging in the emerging markets. Can you share any lessons about your career journey so far? Yeah, I think a lot of people see their career as a series of stepping stones that they have to make it across to get to some career goal they want.

I think this is a mistake. And in my experience, people accelerate faster when they work on problems they really care about rather than choosing roles for some perceived future value to their career. And look, even if that doesn't work out, at least you've always been working on problems you care about. You know, I didn't think for a moment when I joined WhatsApp that within three years I would be the head of product. And I definitely wasn't planning for that. But I loved my job. That showed. And I think it contributed to me getting this role. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think there's a point, of course, usually it's the journey rather than the destination itself. So I probably should get to the main subject of the day. So I want to talk about WhatsApp, a little bit about business, meta and privacy. WhatsApp is now more than a chat app and it's probably essential infrastructure in many parts of the world. So I think for a start,

How do you now think about prioritizing product innovation for such a, I think it's pretty vast, global, and as you said before, culturally diverse users. I'm sure in your journey in looking at different people, a user of WhatsApp in Singapore is probably very different from a user, say, in India or maybe in Australia. So talk about that. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, over 2 billion people in more than 180 countries rely on WhatsApp every day. And we take our responsibility really seriously. So we always try to stay true to three core principles as we design the app, which is simple, reliable and private. You'll probably hear me say those three words a lot today. And so you'll be able to empathize with my team who also hear them a lot. In fact, simple, reliable, private is the name of my conference room in the office. Sometimes it's

I think you can't say something enough but let me say a bit more about what it means

We think the app should be so simple that anyone anywhere could use it. You know, people often tell me even my grandparents find it easy to use WhatsApp, which I love. It needs to be so reliable that it will work even if you're on a basic smartphone in rural India with a poor data connection. But we've learned that if we make it work even in the toughest circumstances, then it actually works better for everyone. Even if you're, say, a tech worker with the latest phone and super high speed Wi-Fi in Singapore.

And it needs to be private because without privacy in your communication, you aren't free to be yourself, not to mention that you're vulnerable to hackers or criminals or anyone who wants to steal your information. So anything we build has to be designed with these three principles in mind. And then in terms of picking what to build, a huge part of our process is listening to our users and understanding what things they want to do with the product or what are they already trying to use it for but getting stuck.

Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to message the people in their life, and they should be able to carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in doing so. But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close friends and family. It's why we're doing things like business messaging. It's why we built new features like channels and status and updates tabs separate from your personal chats. And we think that if we carry on getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more of these features that users want. Yeah.

So one interesting question, because I also like product as well. When you first step into like being the VP of product role, what was the steepest learning curve in leading such a high impact platform? Because I'm pretty sure like, that's what you said, the three core principles in order to make sure that everything has to be right because you're designing for so many users in the world.

Yeah, okay. The steepest learning curve. I think it was probably this, which is learning that the features you say no to are probably more important than the features you say yes to. So with such a massive and diverse user base, it's easy to come up with, you know, 50 ideas for breakfast of like cool blue sky things that tens of millions of people might want to use. But that leaves a few billion people who don't want them.

And not only does that clutter up the app, but it also distracts you from working on the core things that people really care about. Things that sometimes sound less exciting, like driving up call reliability or making small improvements to the user journeys that collectively people are using billions of times a day. Like recently, we just made it a little bit easier to send a reaction and it's had a major impact to how people are using the app. Many more reactions are being sent.

So I have to say no to a lot of ideas and keep my team laser focused on the things that most people really want, irrespective of whether they're super noticeable, like introducing channels or AI, or very subtle, like improving the results when you search for your contacts.

I find the channels part of that was really interesting because you can actually get information there, right? Specifically when, because I teach in a university, when I need to disseminate information to the students from outside the world. So for context, can you give my audience, say, a snapshot of WhatsApp's current product footprint? I mean, I think...

A lot of people probably started right at the beginning when I first used WhatsApp. It's just basically sending private messages, sending images and videos. Today, I think there's a lot of business services. I myself also try to use it as well. And what is it beyond just personal and business services? Yeah, well, at its core, WhatsApp is a private messaging app for conversations between friends and family. And I think that's the main WhatsApp we're all familiar with.

Outside of the calls and chats tab, the other most important tab is the updates tab, which is where you'll find status. That's WhatsApp Stories product for sharing updates from your daily life with contacts and channels, which we introduced in 2023 as a way to keep up to date updates.

with things that you're interested in. Then we have the WhatsApp Business App, which is a free app with more than 200 million users made for small and medium businesses that allows them to connect with their customers. And lastly, we have the WhatsApp Business Platform. So that's our product for larger businesses that need a more scalable solution to connect with their customers. People like an airline who might be sending boarding passes to their users or e-commerce company or a bank.

And so people can either reach out to receive support from a business like this, or they opt in to receive useful information in return. And we charge businesses to send these types of messages. So I think in many countries, mobile is probably the primary gateway to the internet. I guess, how do those usage patterns actually influence how you think about the product? Because the entry point is different.

Yeah, you're absolutely right about mobile. And indeed, for many people around the world, I think WhatsApp is really their experience of the internet. That's definitely shaped our business products. So, for example, one of our two major revenue lines is click-to-WhatsApp ads. These are ads that run on Facebook and Instagram. When you click on them, instead of taking you to a business's website, they take you directly into a WhatsApp chat with the business.

Because a lot of the businesses we serve don't even have a website. They just run their whole operation on WhatsApp. So it's great for them to be able to advertise in a way that suits their business. Then on the consumer side, we design features with an awareness of people's mobile behavior. So in a lot of countries around the world, including many in Asia, we know that users often have more than one SIM and therefore more than one number on their phone. So we've given the ability to have two numbers on WhatsApp that they can toggle between.

And as well as people having two numbers on one phone, in lower income settings, lots of people share phones within a household. And that makes some of our privacy features so important, like ChatBlock, which allows you to hide particularly personal chats so they don't appear in your inbox and you enter a special PIN to access them. Yeah, wow.

Okay, that is interesting because I actually didn't thought about a use case such as like you can have one house who's actually sharing one phone, but actually multiple users on there. So like, for example, have any kind of market specific behaviors or trends actually like surprise you from a product leadership standpoint? I guess specifically the emerging economies, and if you didn't mention just now about that particular feature, it didn't really cross my mind why it is there on the market.

Yeah. Well, you know, I spent most of my life in the UK where WhatsApp is ubiquitous for speaking to friends and family. But when I travel to other countries, especially emerging economies, I am often amazed at how much people use WhatsApp for interacting with businesses. Wow.

So this is true also in Southeast Asia, especially countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, also Singapore, where a lot of small businesses are already using WhatsApp to connect with their customers, whether that's like a local grocer's or a pet shop owner's or a fashion outlet. And seeing this behavior, you know, this happened long before we ever had specific business products, but it's what inspired us to launch the WhatsApp business app in 2018 and make it easier for businesses to do the things they were already trying to do. So this version of WhatsApp has features like

away messages because you can't always be on as a business owner or catalogs, which lets them share their products easily. I was trying to think of what would be a good consumer trend to mention too. I think another one we've seen, particularly in some emerging markets, is users prefer to send voice messages over typing.

because they're fast and they're easy and it lets you have a more expressive conversation. But the problem with voice messages is the receivers don't always like listening to them. Perhaps, you know, if you're on the move or you're in a loud place or you just get a long voice message and you don't have time to listen to it. So for some of those moments, we introduced voice message transcriptions last year, which turn the voice message into text so you can keep up with it however you want.

Okay. I have not encountered that, but I do know that there's probably in China, most people would do voice messaging.

much more often as compared to say other parts of the world. So when even when I see Chinese users using WhatsApp to communicate with me, they ended up doing the same behavior. But the transcription feature I published, trying to figure out how to use that because I actually like you said, would prefer just practicing and see the message rather than listening to the message.

Yeah, one more curious point. So when I was in my previous role as a CIO, we were actually looking at what's that for business

to actually have one of the subsidiaries to actually do something like a customer relationship management tool to engage for purchase of new properties on there. And I think WhatsApp for Business, I think supports almost everything from, you know, very small merchants to global enterprises like, you know, Singapore Airlines, I know now I receive my notifications through them as well, through WhatsApp. How has this ecosystem has actually evolved

And what does the common scale look like today? Yeah.

Well, I think you're right to call out the very different kinds of businesses using WhatsApp for Business. As I said, it all kind of kicked off in 2018 that we started formally supporting businesses, although in fact they had been widespread on the platform for a long, long time before that. And maybe a good way to understand the scale is to look at what are some of the kinds of businesses. So there's a small family business called Ruli Silver that make customized jewelry specializing in wedding bands, and they're based in Jogja, Jakarta in Indonesia.

They've got just one small physical store, but using the WhatsApp business app and its various tools, they've been able to export their jewelry all the way to places like Paris. And it's not an isolated example. You know, today there are more than 200 million users of the WhatsApp business app.

Staying with Indonesia examples, a large established organization like Bank Mandiri uses WhatsApp's business platform to manage close to 10,000 interactions daily. Or when I was in India recently, I bought a ticket for the Delhi Metro directly within a WhatsApp thread, like tens of thousands of other people do all the time. And this is happening at scale, you know, at WhatsApp kind of scale all around the world.

Yeah, and I forgot to mention, like for me, because Saturday is to send all my kids as a Grab driver across all the different tuition centers. But most of the tuition centers actually, I think primarily all communication is actually through WhatsApp.

for any information that's disseminated to us, even down to say dealing with payments. So I think it's pretty ubiquitous in terms of how users are actually engaging businesses in this part of the world. I'm quite curious. I think WhatsApp is renowned for its commitment to privacy. I think this is

right in the beginning, before it was acquired by Meta. So how do you ensure these kind of new features, even including, say, with AI, to actually still align with the foundational promise of privacy? I think this is one area I think you are probably most qualified to talk about. Yeah, I'm really pleased you asked about that because

Privacy is at the heart of everything we do. I mentioned it's in our kind of core three design principles. And we use end-to-end encryption by default to protect all your chats with friends, family, colleagues, so that no one else, not even WhatsApp, can see them. And that's the very baseline of our privacy promise. But we also look for ways to make WhatsApp even more private on top of that.

And we think of these as adding additional layers of protection. So in recent years, I'm thinking of something like we added disappearing messages and view once messages so that conversation disappear on a timer. We've added a bunch of group controls, like the ability to leave a group silently. That was a hotly demanded one. And also control who can add you to a group.

We've given users more power to do things like decide who sees when you're online and silence unknown callers. And right now we're testing advanced chat privacy, which will give users even more control over who can export your chats or save media that you share with them in one-to-ones and groups. But as for AI, you know, meta AI only reads what you share with it, but your personal messages remain end-to-end encrypted. Chat

Chats with AI are visually indicated, so it's very clear that they're different from your personal messages and conversations. Because we've had such great feedback on AI and WhatsApp so far, we're continuing to explore ways to make it more useful, maybe to give you help in writing your messages or reading your noisy group chats.

There are of course major technical challenges about how we can do this in a private way. So we won't be releasing any features until we've innovated enough behind the scenes to ensure that this can be done while preserving the privacy of everyone's personal messages. And also I think, I guess AI is a little bit more tricky because you have the foundation models which are pretty large and it actually requires quite a lot of service like computing and less technical design, right? And also

For example, you will probably, this is what we call small language models. And then probably from there, until the best model comes along, maybe that would be a pretty useful when it goes into phones itself. I guess the question that I always have is, I think you already talked about your three key principles, right? And let's say you want to decide whether a new feature or specifically anything, let's say around privacy, AI,

How does the principles guide your team in terms of thinking about it so that it actually adds values rather versus, say, introduce complexity overall for the product? Yeah. I mean, I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think it is the central trade-off decision that we're always trying to make. Yeah.

And I guess the principle is, if you just want to use WhatsApp to message the people in your life, then you should be able to do that and have a great experience in doing so. It's so important that we protect that core experience. But because we are always listening to our users, and we know that there are a lot of other people who are eager to do more with their WhatsApp, we want to be able to meet the most important of those needs with other optional tools.

experiences. So channels, which is one of the biggest product changes I've led in this role, is a good example, I think, of how we approach this. We'd heard from a lot of people that they wanted to be able to keep up with topics and organizations they were interested in alongside their private messages. So we built channels as a one-way broadcast tool, and we decided to put it in the updates tab so it would be separate from your private messages and

We also wanted to build the most private version of this feature. So, for example, no one else can see which channels that you're in and you're following. So even though it was an interesting broadcast feature, we wanted to adhere to our principles around privacy. And so far, it's proved quite popular. You know, some big use cases are sports teams giving real-time updates on matches, entertainment like Indonesian Idol or Netflix.

Governments like the Singapore government, which has a big channel with over 100,000 followers. Some celebrities. I loved your university example as well. But it's not for everyone. And that's fine. If you don't want to follow a single channel, you don't have to. And you're not going to see any channel updates. So with WhatsApp, we want you to always feel in control. Yeah.

Actually, one of the best use case that I do for my students is because I teach generative AI in the universities, both technical and for business executives. And the field is changing so much, practically almost every week. Watchtower almost become like my weekly channel.

to basically send updated information to them. So that I always tell them, you know, whatever I teach you. Probably next three months, something has changed. So I made a commitment that we will change whatever materials that we have that's changed. We just send it to them across WhatsApp. So this is the...

Interesting part, right? And actually, to be quite honest, for me, when I watch WhatsApp, it's actually the iteration doesn't tend to be so fast. What is the balance between, say, iterating on the product, could be fast, could be slow, versus maintaining user trust? I think especially working at your scale, because one feature change can affect almost a lot of people. And I think different cultures may have different nuances in the way how they use WhatsApp.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the real answer is if we ever encounter kind of a conflict between iterating, especially trying to iterate fast, and user trust, then we would pick user trust every time. And that's quite rare in technology companies, but we'd rather move more slowly if we have to, if a feature needs more time to hit our quality bar or be as simple, reliable, and private as what users expect and deserve from WhatsApp.

Having said that, getting improvements into the hands of our users faster has been a big focus for me and the WhatsApp leadership team since I took on this role. And we've evolved the organization to make that possible. I think it's been working. We are shipping improvements faster than ever before. We've had some recognition for this. So, for example, last year, we were one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of the year, which would have been kind of inconceivable for WhatsApp only a few years ago. But the

But more important than industry awards, we've heard a huge amount of love from our users for all of the new features we've bought them lately, some of which they've been hoping for a long time, whether it's core messaging features like editing messages or the unread filter or features in updates to app like channels. A great one we launched pretty recently this year is the ability to add music to your status. And that's delighted a lot of people.

Yeah, I think I saw that one. That one I was trying to figure out how... I guess when I looked at every product, maybe it's just the product's IP, I always try to work out exactly what kind of users are they intended for. So I guess, what is the one thing that you know about privacy in WhatsApp that very few do?

I think very few people know how much work goes into building WhatsApp's high levels of privacy, especially at our scale. So encryption introduces big technical challenges into features that otherwise seem simple. For example, adding polls, which is one of those features people have been asking for ages and we did not too long ago. Because with encryption, so much happens on the client side versus on the server. Yeah, that's a good point. Another example maybe is...

Yeah, that was a learning curve as well, joining the organization. But another example was adding end-to-end encrypted backups, which was a big technical challenge. If you consider that over 100 billion messages are sent every day. Yes. We were the first product at scale to introduce this. And then Apple followed, which we thought was great.

but it required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage. But we were happy to invest in that work so that we could give people more privacy. And of course, a lot of the kind of innovations at this kind of scale, I think it's

very subtle and not many people realize I think Facebook has actually innovated not just that right even the databases open computing as well and I think with AI like Lama I know you've just launched Lamafall so I guess now with meta AI integrated into the WhatsApp

What is the mental model that's going to be guiding AI within that? I guess what are the most interesting use cases that will be exciting from your vantage point when integrating AI into messaging? Because I think that, like you said just now, the fact that people were just thinking about what message to send, maybe ask the AI to frame the message on their...

Yeah. So in many countries, as you say, you can now chat with the Meta AI assistant directly in WhatsApp. My personal belief is that messaging will be the main way that people interact with AI in the future because the promise of LLMs is you can find out anything or actually do anything just by having a chat with an intelligent agent. And we've designed WhatsApp for chatting. So

I also think WhatsApp can democratize AI by making it available to a global audience, not just the usual tech elites and early adopters. And we're already seeing the signs of this, like better AI within WhatsApp is popular in the US, but it's also been really popular in countries like India, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia.

And I'm excited about how useful it is and how it can help people get things done in their daily lives. So some of the popular use cases for Meta AI and WhatsApp are for homework help, whether for yourself or your children. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Or for recipe ideas and other information seeking. Or sometimes people tell me they're using things like somebody sent me a message about this thing, helping me understand what that thing is.

People are also using it to be creative. That's another really interesting avenue. So you can generate stickers or images of anything you like. You can even generate images of yourself, which is pretty fun. Like imagine me climbing Mount Everest or whatever. And then lastly, there are big opportunities that AI is creating for business messaging.

So we see an opportunity for AI assistance to help businesses of any size benefit from being able to have closer, more engaging interactions with their customers. And we're testing agents right now with a small number of businesses in a few markets to start, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, in fact. And we expect to scale more soon. So I'm just excited to see where we can take it. So I have two questions for them, but I think I will go with...

much more interesting one first. So for the upcoming features, so you're actually retesting things like AI agents for businesses. How do you specifically say design it for to enhance, let's say, user control or safety within WhatsApp itself? Yeah, I mean, you know,

User control and safety is paramount when we're designing anything. I think, you know, specifically in the case of the AI that businesses are using, a huge part of it is making sure everybody understands what the kind of nature of the conversation is. So the user has to, the user gets information and has to choose to continue to know that they're having a conversation with an AI business. And the business is also doing the same, knows that the AI can be responding on their behalf to their customers.

But kind of zooming out from the AI agent specifically, a lot of our safety work is done in the backend, such as using machine learning to identify spammers and scammers based on things like how many messages are they sending per second? And then we can remove those bad accounts.

And, you know, some of it's more visible stuff like WhatsApp, it's fundamentally architected to protect people from unwanted contact. So you can't search for people or message them unless you have their phone number. Whenever you get a message from someone who isn't in your contacts, we've always asked you right away if you want to block or report them.

And we've tried to enhance some of these safety features and controls more recently. So, you know, maybe AI will help people impersonate other people. But when somebody starts a conversation with you now, we show a context card. When you get a message from someone you don't know, and that will give you information like, is the phone number saved in your phone book? What country is the number from? Do you have any groups in common? And these kinds of things help people decide whether they want to continue the conversation or block the number. Yeah.

And similarly, now we're giving people the option to silence all unknown callers since we know a lot of scams take place via calls. Yes. And to be quite honest, I totally like your block feature. When I get an unknown number, typically even it sounds relatively... Well, I call it

In a certain message, sometimes the thing is actually like a scammy message. So I'll just press the block button and just get it right over. On the end sheet, surprisingly, it's a business account. I actually like the way how you all designed it in such a way when I press that button, it just...

automatically get everything done. And I think you even give me the option to press delete the conversation as well. How do you then ensure safe AI features because it requires to maybe get context of your information to remain non-intrusive and preserve that kind of simplicity that WhatsApp have? I mean, I'm not even talking about adding things like hallucination as well, because AI also do have the propensity of making errors as well. Yeah.

I mean, I think firstly and most importantly, all of our AI features are optional. So if you don't want to use them and you just want to keep messaging the way you are today, you can totally do that.

I mentioned earlier that we try and make the chat with AI really visually distinct. So it's clear to people that these are different than their personal messages and conversations. But in general, I actually think one of the interesting things is that people like interacting with AI within WhatsApp because they find it simple. You know, they don't have to download and learn some new app. They can just interact by chatting in a thread the way they normally do. They actually sometimes just use the AI interface.

too casually do something, you know, like generate an image, generate an emoji bag and on that. I guess given now we have a lot of people talk about this year as the year for AI agents. And now, of course, being what's that is now becoming increasingly more important for say business and transactions. I guess what are some of the key safety challenges that the product will be addressing from your point of view?

Yeah, I mean, I think one big upcoming feature that's going to be really impactful for is usernames, which are going to add an extra degree of privacy so that you don't need to share your phone number when you're messaging someone, including when you're messaging a business.

We always make it clear to people when they are chatting with a business and we let you block and report them and share the reasons that you were doing that. We've got policies in place that businesses have to follow about what they can or cannot sell or promote on WhatsApp. And recently, we also launched MetaVerified, which is where we verify that someone is the real business they say they are. And in return, make it easier for businesses to build credibility with their customers by getting a blue verified badge and impersonation protection, among some other things.

Right. For example, Blue Verify. So how does the user actually, the business user actually get access to it? Is it just basically registering through your platform and basically make sure that they upload the relevant documents to basically verify that who they are or some form of business, know your customer? Yeah.

Yeah, it's exactly that. So if you're a user of the WhatsApp business app, you can go through our verification flow where you need to provide some information about yourself. And then if we can verify you, we'll award you that verified blue badge. And it comes with a bunch of additional useful features for businesses as well.

So how would you now access a measure user trust, say, qualitatively or quantitatively within WhatsApp itself? Yeah, we hear from our users in various ways. So we get a ton of feedback and feature requests and people telling us what they like or what they don't like within the app itself using the feedback option.

That's how we originally heard a lot about people wanting reactions before we'd introduced that, for example. Or in fact, we had a massive spike in feedback after we started a gradual rollout of meta AI in Indonesia, where vast numbers of people who didn't have access yet got in touch to say they wanted us to make it available to them immediately, which was kind of encouraging.

We also hear feedback on social and we listen to those channels carefully. And we travel to countries where WhatsApp's used a lot to hear from users on the ground. We think it's important to everyone who's building WhatsApp to do the app so they can learn from our users directly, even the leadership team. You know, I've personally made recent trips to India, Mexico, Brazil to do user research about the app and our new features and nothing really compares to getting to talk to people in person, see their context,

and just learn more about their lives. So do you, in every trip we go, whether it's Mexico, India, you come back with this whole list of pictures on it that you get and then you're like, oh my, where should I pack them? I'm sure it's annoying for the DMV, yeah.

Yeah, every time. So what is the one question you wish more people would ask you about, Liza? I think I wish more people would ask me why is privacy so important in communication? Yes, why is privacy so important then? Well, thank you. You know, privacy protects everyone.

Whether it's journalists talking to their sources or conversations between doctors and patients or when you need to share your credit card number with your child. I think the reality is all of our personal exchanges are at risk from increasing threats posed by hackers, malware, spyware companies and more.

But it goes beyond that. We believe in everyday privacy, not just privacy for the hypersensitive conversations, because everyday privacy makes you feel free to be yourself. You know, you wouldn't feel comfortable being yourself if there was a camera in your living room recording everything you did and said.

You wouldn't accept it in your physical life and you shouldn't accept it in your digital life either. Of course, end-to-end encryption is the gold standard here. But another nice example of everyday privacy on WhatsApp is disappearing messages. You know, it's a relief to know you can say what you want now and not have it hanging around forever and ever into the future. And as we launched that, it's grown hugely. And now lots of people have it turned on by default for all of their conversations. Yeah.

Yeah, I do know that. Specifically for younger kids, like teenagers, I think they like to do that. So my traditional closing question then, what does great look like or what's that in the next few years on the product and privacy? I think it looks like continuing to be the best, most private way that people can communicate and continuing to keep the app simple, reliable and private for more than 2 billion people. Okay.

Alice, many thanks for coming on the show and talking about an app that I think I've probably used at least 10%.

of my day on a mobile phone. So in closing, any recommendations which have inspired you recently? I was trying to think if I could, you know, have any like pithy answers to this, like business books or something. But honestly, I'm the mother to a two and four year old. So I read a lot of children's books. And I think the older ones are all of the best ones, like Dr. Seuss. You know, there are some great life lessons in there. I don't know if you know all the places you'll go, but the way it talks about handling adversity in life, I think that's brilliant. Yeah.

Believe it or not, I think children's books from the UK are actually better.

than most part of the world. Yeah, like Jeffrey others. And I think the other, I forgot the other lady who actually writes a very good books on there. That's great. So how can my audience find you? Well, I'm on LinkedIn as Alice Newton Rex. Or if you're interested in getting more news about everything exciting coming up on WhatsApp and all of the features my team and I are working on, you can follow the official WhatsApp channel as well as the WhatsApp handle and WhatsApp business handles on Instagram, X,

or Facebook. And you can definitely find the podcast anywhere from YouTube to Spotify and of course drop us the feedback on any channel that you want to. So, Alice, many thanks for coming on the show and thank you for sharing a lot of what you are building there today with us. Thank you too. Thanks.