They've had a few breaches: www.whatsapp.com/security/advisories/
Video 1. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum talks about their Journey by Roots (2017) Source. Good talk, explains how everything happened in the perfect location at the perfect time: unemployed people who knew how to code, bought an iPhone, the next big platform, at its very beginning, they had just release the required push notifications API, and he travelled a lot and knew how much SMS sucked, especially international.
Obviously with the single intention of killing a competitor.
It is impossible to make money off WhatsApp as it is because of end-to-end encryption.
Facebook just clearly bought it to prevent it from actually growing further and killing facebook.
It is mindblowing that the sale wasn't cancelled due to anti trust.
The outcome of this is that WhatApp will remain with the same feature set forever, while other competitors have been growing, notably Discord and Slack.
It seems that there is a case looming 10 years after the fact: www.cityam.com/facebook-fails-to-block-antitrust-lawsuit-over-whatsapp-and-instagram-ownership/ Wake up???
Your profile picture, name and status are public by default as of 2022!!! OMG!!!
This means that all secret services in the world have alrady scraped this information for everyone that uses WhatsApp!!!
They just have to go incrementally through the list of all phone numbers... 001 0000 0000, 001 0000 0001, 001 0000 0002, etc. and then you can deduce who has which phone number.
OMG... it is analogous to the Facebook profile face dump.