Meta is facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly misleading users about end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp. An international group of plaintiffs alleges that the company has made false claims about the privacy and security of the chat service, which would have harmed billions of people around the world.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta’s statements about the protection of information on WhatsApp are not true.
The plaintiffs, from countries such as Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, claim that the company and its managers have deceived the public by claiming that WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption as a central function to guarantee the privacy of messages.
According to the indictment, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze and can access virtually all supposedly ‘private’ communications of WhatsApp users.”
The plaintiffs maintain that, despite the app’s messages indicating that “only people participating in this chat can read, listen to or share” the content, the company can access the information and, in some cases, its employees would have the ability to review it.
The group supports its claim by citing “whistleblowers” who have revealed internal practices at Meta, although the court documents do not specify their identities or provide additional details.
Since its acquisition by Meta in 2014, WhatsApp has promoted end-to-end encryption as a fundamental pillar of its service, ensuring that only the sender and recipient can access the content of messages. According to the company, this feature is activated by default and provides superior security against possible privacy violations.
Bloomberg reports that, in response to the lawsuit, an official spokesperson for Meta called the legal action “frivolous” and announced that the company “will pursue sanctions against the plaintiffs’ attorneys.”
Company spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email: “Any claim that WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd.”In addition, he defended that “WhatsApp has had end-to-end encryption using the Signal protocol for a decade” and considered that the lawsuit is “a frivolous fiction.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers asked the court to certify the case as a class action, which would add up to billions of potentially affected users on different continents.The complaint indicates that Meta would have prioritized obtaining data and analyzing communications, contradicting its public commitment to absolute privacy on WhatsApp.
The judicial process seeks to determine whether the company’s practices coincide with its messages to the public and whether there were specific harms to users.The controversy puts transparency and the obligations of large technology companies in the management of personal information under privacy and security standards at the center of the debate.
End-to-end encryption on WhatsApp is a security technology designed to protect the privacy of messages.When this feature is activated, sent messages can only be read by the sender and recipient, as they are encrypted in such a way that no other person, not even WhatsApp or Meta, can access the content during its transmission.
This system uses unique encryption keys for each conversation, which means that even if a third party intercepted the data as it traveled over the network, they would not be able to decrypt it without those keys.
Thus, end-to-end encryption ensures that photos, videos, calls and messages remain private, reinforcing users’ confidence in the security of their communications within the application.
