An international group of plaintiffs sued US tech firm Meta Platforms alleging that the company has made false claims about the privacy and security of its WhatsApp chat service.
Meta has made so-called “end-to-end” encryption a central part of the messaging app’s feature set, offering a kind of encryption that means a message is only accessible to the sender and recipient, but not the company.
In this kind of encrypted chat, which the company says is turned on by default, WhatsApp’s in-app messaging says “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” the messages.
However, in a lawsuit filed in US District Court in San Francisco, the group of plaintiffs allege that Meta’s privacy claims are false.
They allege that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications” — and accuse the companies and their leaders of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide.
A spokesperson for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said that the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.”
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”
The group, which includes plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, alleges that Meta stores the substance of users’ communications and that workers can get access to them.
The complaint cites “whistleblowers” as having helped bring this information to light, though it doesn’t explain who they are.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs are asking the court to certify a class-action suit.
In 2021, WhatsApp’s parent company was hit with a €225m fine by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner after a GDPR investigation into how it shares information with other companies within the company’s group. Meta is appealing this fine.
