By Agbowa Ani
SAN FRANCISCO — Meta Platforms Inc. has been sued in the United States by an international group of plaintiffs who accuse the company of misleading WhatsApp users about the privacy of their messages, alleging that the platform’s claims of end-to-end encryption are false.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, contends that Meta and its WhatsApp messaging service “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications,” despite repeated assurances to the contrary.
WhatsApp has long marketed end-to-end encryption as a core security feature, telling users that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” messages and that the protection is enabled by default.
The plaintiffs argue those statements are deceptive. According to the complaint, Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, and its executives misled billions of users worldwide by portraying messages as inaccessible even to the company itself.
“Defendants have systematically misrepresented the nature of WhatsApp’s encryption,” the lawsuit said, alleging that Meta retains the ability to store and access message content.
Meta strongly rejected the claims, calling the lawsuit baseless.
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Meta spokesman 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.”
Stone added that Meta intends to seek sanctions against the plaintiffs’ legal team.
The plaintiffs include individuals from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa. The lawsuit alleges that Meta stores the contents of user communications and that company employees are able to access them. It also cites unnamed “whistleblowers” as sources for the allegations, though no individuals were identified.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs are seeking class-action status, which could significantly broaden the scope of the case to include WhatsApp users globally.
Several attorneys listed on the complaint, including those from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Another lawyer representing the plaintiffs, Jay Barnett of Barnett Legal, declined to comment.
WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users worldwide, making the case one of the most closely watched legal challenges yet to Meta’s data privacy practices.
