In a move that reverberates through the corridors of Silicon Valley and Westminster alike, Indian entrepreneur Kunal Shah, founder of the fintech juggernaut CRED, has been appointed as the new head of WhatsApp. The announcement, made jointly by Meta and the UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF), signals a paradigm shift in how the messaging titan navigates the treacherous waters of global regulation.
Shah, known for his unorthodox approach to user behaviour and data ethics, inherits a platform that processes over 100 billion messages daily. His mandate: to reimagine WhatsApp as a bastion of digital sovereignty while adhering to the UK’s Online Safety Bill and the EU’s Digital Services Act. The partnership, framed as a ‘British-Tech innovation accord’, will see WhatsApp collaborate directly with UK regulators on real-time compliance tools, a first for any major platform.
“This is not about damage control,” Shah said in an exclusive interview. “It’s about building a protocol layer for trust. We are moving from a reactive moderation model to a predictive consent framework. Imagine a messaging app that understands your privacy preferences before you even type.” His vision involves decentralising user data storage using quantum-safe encryption, effectively making it impossible for even WhatsApp to read messages without explicit, revocable consent.
The timing is no coincidence. Britain’s Online Safety Bill, which comes into full effect next year, imposes draconian duties on platforms to prevent disinformation and child exploitation. For Shah, compliance is an unsolved engineering challenge. “Regulators often lack the technical literacy to see how their rules could inadvertently break end-to-end encryption. My role is to translate intent into code,” he explained.
Under the accord, a joint taskforce of UK legislators and Meta engineers will produce open-source audit tools. These tools, to be published on GitHub, will allow independent researchers to verify that WhatsApp’s algorithms do not favour certain political content or governments. Shah’s plan also includes a ‘Digital Bill of Rights’ embedded into the app’s terms of service, enforceable via smart contracts.
Yet the road ahead is fraught with dystopian possibilities. Critics argue that Shah’s vision of “predictive consent” could normalise mass surveillance. If an AI can predict your privacy preferences, can it also predict your political leanings? “That’s the Black Mirror question we are constantly asking ourselves,” Shah admitted. “We must design systems that error on the side of individual autonomy.”
From a user experience perspective, the biggest change will be the gradual elimination of phone numbers as identifiers. Instead, WhatsApp will adopt decentralised IDs (DIDs) anchored to the blockchain, allowing users to vet each other’s credentials without exposing personal data. This ‘zero-knowledge social graph’ is Shah’s pet project, inspired by his days at CRED where he gamified credit scores.
British regulators are cautiously optimistic. Lord Peter Hain, chair of the DRCF, said: “Mr Shah’s background in reshaping consumer behaviour through incentive design gives us hope. But we will hold them to exacting standards. Trust is not a product; it is a process.”
For the average WhatsApp user, the changes will be invisible at first. But Shah promises a new notification: “Your message is being sent via a trust-minimised channel.” This, he believes, is the future: a world where technology and regulation are not adversaries but co-architects of digital civility. If successful, the British-Tech partnership could become a template for the global internet, proving that innovation and oversight can coexist without trade-offs.
As Shah settles into his new role, one thing is clear: the era of ‘move fast and break things’ is over. The new mantra is ‘build slow and fix faster’. And with a man who made a business out of paying credit card bills on time, the odds might just be in WhatsApp’s favour.
