A lawsuit filed in the United States has accused Meta of misleading users about WhatsApp’s privacy protections.
The case alleges that Meta and WhatsApp store, analyze, and can access nearly all private user communications, despite claiming the platform is end-to-end encrypted. Meta has strongly denied the allegations, calling the lawsuit a “frivolous work of fiction.”
The lawsuit was filed in a US District Court in San Francisco by a group of plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. The plaintiffs argue that Meta and its leadership deceived billions of WhatsApp users worldwide by falsely promoting strong privacy protections. They are now asking the court to approve the case as a class-action lawsuit.
According to the complaint, Meta allegedly stores the content of WhatsApp messages and allows company employees to access them under certain circumstances. Reports cited in the filing claim that this directly contradicts WhatsApp’s long-standing promise of complete message privacy.
Meta has firmly rejected these claims and stated it plans to seek sanctions against the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. A Meta spokesperson said that any suggestion that WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is “categorically false and absurd,” adding that WhatsApp has used end-to-end encryption based on the Signal protocol for over a decade.
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