Google is reportedly negotiating with messaging app WhatsApp over a possible takeover worth nearly $1bn (£655m)
According to an inside source, the negotiations started more than a month ago, says DigitalTrends.
Further reading
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WhatsApp is an early-stage tech startup founded by two ex-Yahoo employees. The app is popular among smartphone users as it allows messages to be exchanged cross-platform without having to pay for SMS.
Google has a combination of separate communication services such as Google Talk and Google+ Messenger; WhatsApp could help to streamline this. It could also provide iMessage-like functionality for other platforms, as many iOS apps for Google Talk are not fully functional.
In August 2012, WhatsApp said it was sending and receiving up to 10 billion messages per day and on 31 December it managed 18 billion messages.
The firm has focussed on charging for the app on iOS (£0.69 or $0.99) while striking deals with carriers as the messaging consumes data, a key area where mobile networks attempt to cash-in on consumer use.
It would be interesting to see what Google would do with WhatsApp. It may just acquire some of the talent and then force the app to shut down. It could also take a different stance to WhatsApp's current policy on the use of personal data.
In June last year, WhatsApp claimed that it did not carry advertising as it was not interested in collecting personal data.
"Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought," it said.
Indeed, in every company that sells ads, it continued, engineers spend their day data-mining and writing better code to collect personal data to ensure that an advertising banner is better targeted at the consumer.
Google, though, may want to capitalise on WhatsApp's current user base and use their personal data, something that the company has come under scrutiny for in the past.
Last month, it had to pay $7m (£4.6m) across 38 US states in a legal settlement over the "inappropriate" harvesting of personal data that occurred during its Street View project between 2008 and 2010.
Data included emails, passwords and internet browsing histories, all of which Google agreed to destroy as part of the settlement. More recently, six European data protection authorities revealed that they were planning to conduct formal investigations into Google's privacy policies.
Questions over whether its privacy policy is compliant with various data protection acts forms part of the investigation, while France's National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) questioned whether Google's processing of personal data was legal.
