Lawsuit Alleges WhatsApp Can Read Your Messages Despite End-To-End Encryption, Meta Denies Claim

Hyderabad: A lawsuit filed against Meta, on Friday in a US District Court in San Francisco, alleged that WhatsApp—Meta’s instant messaging application—made false claims about the privacy and security of the chat service, questioning the platform's central feature, end-to-end encryption.

For the unversed, the feature ensures that the messages between two people are only accessible to the sender and recipient, and even WhatsApp can't see the contents of the communication. Meta advertised WhatsApp as a secure platform where people can come and have conversations without the fear of their messages being read by someone else.

The lawsuit alleged that Meta stores, analyses, and grants employee access to chat contents via internal tools. The plaintiffs have accused Meta and its leadership of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide.

The group of plaintiffs hail from different countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, providing international scope to the lawsuit, adding weight that the alleged privacy concerns are not limited to a region or one legal system.

The lawsuit mentions that whistleblowers played a vital role in bringing the alleged practices to light. However, specific details about whistleblowers were not provided.

Meta denied all allegations and dismissed the case as baseless. The tech giant has indicated its plans to seek sanctions against the lawyers who filed the case. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that the claims made by the case’s plaintiffs are “categorically false and absurd”. He claimed that WhatsApp has been using end-to-end encryption using the Signal protocol for a decade, and the lawsuit is “a frivolous work of fiction”.

As the case gained online attention, Elon Musk used it to promote his social media platform and its messaging service. Taking to X, he said, “WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use X Chat.”

Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp, replied to Musk's post and said, “This is totally false. WhatsApp can’t read messages because the encryption keys are stored on your phone, and we don’t have access to them. This is a no-merit, headline-seeking lawsuit brought by the very same firm defending NSO after their spyware attacked journalists and government officials.”