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WhatsApp messages aren’t private, claims fresh lawsuit against Meta, ‘whistleblower’ account cited
According to the complaint, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.”
An international group of users has reportedly sued Meta Platforms, Inc., accusing the company of misleading billions of WhatsApp users about the privacy of their messages and falsely claiming that chats are “end-to end” encrypted. However, Meta has denied the allegations, terming the lawsuit baseless.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday in a US District Court in San Francisco, challenges Meta’s long-standing assertions that WhatsApp messages are protected by end-to-end encryption and inaccessible to the company itself, according to a Bloomberg report.
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What WhatsApp promises users
End-to-end encryption has been a central pillar of WhatsApp’s privacy pitch. Meta has repeatedly said this form of encryption ensures that messages can only be read by the sender and the recipient — not even WhatsApp or its parent company.
Inside the app, WhatsApp tells users that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” their messages, adding that the feature is enabled by default, Bloomberg report added. Such note even appears at the start of any chat on the applcation.
The plaintiffs argue that these assurances do not reflect how the service actually works.
'Stored and accessible messages'
According to the complaint, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” The lawsuit accuses the companies — and their leadership — of defrauding users across the globe by marketing WhatsApp as a private messaging platform.
The group of plaintiffs includes users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. They claim Meta stores the substance of user communications and that company employees are able to access those messages.
The filing also references “whistleblowers” who allegedly helped uncover these practices, though the complaint does not identify them or explain their roles.
Meta rejects claims
Meta has strongly denied the allegations, dismissing the lawsuit as baseless.
A spokesperson for the company, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, said Meta plans to fight the case aggressively. The lawsuit, the spokesperson said, is “frivolous,” and the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.”
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email, cited by Bloomberg. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs are asking the court to certify the case as a class-action lawsuit, potentially expanding it to include large numbers of WhatsApp users worldwide.
Several attorneys listed in the complaint, including those from the firms Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Another lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jay Barnett of Barnett Legal, declined to comment on Saturday night.
