Meta is currently facing a new lawsuit challenging its claims regarding the privacy of WhatsApp messages. An international group of plaintiffs argues that the company has misled users. They claim Meta stated that their chats are fully private and secure.
Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, involving individuals from several countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. They contend that Meta’s public statements about WhatsApp’s “end-to-end” encryption are false.
End-to-end encryption is a system that, according to WhatsApp, ensures that only the sender and the receiver can read a message. The company claims that it cannot access the content of these messages at all. Additionally, WhatsApp informs users within the app that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” the messages. WhatsApp also explains that this protection is enabled by default.
However, according to a Bloomberg report, the complainants assert this is not true. In their complaint, they allege that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” They blame the company and its leaders for misleading and defrauding billions of users around the world.
Meta strongly denies the recent lawsuit’s claim that its employees can read users’ private messages. The lawsuit notes this claim relies on information from secret “whistleblowers.”
Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, called the lawsuit “false” and “silly,” and said the company will fight it in court. Stone completely rejected the claims. He stated, “The idea that people’s WhatsApp messages are not scrambled (encrypted) is completely wrong and ridiculous. WhatsApp has used the strong scrambling technology called the Signal protocol for ten years.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers have requested that the court permit the case to move forward as a class-action lawsuit, the report said.
Meta has often justified its 2014 purchase of WhatsApp by highlighting its focus on user privacy and end-to-end encryption. However, this current situation might drastically change how the public views the real level of privacy provided by encrypted messaging apps.