An international coalition of plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc., accusing the company of making false claims regarding the privacy and security features of its instant messaging application, WhatsApp.
Meta Platforms promotes so-called "end-to-end" encryption as a core feature of WhatsApp, a technology that, in theory, ensures messages are visible only to the sender and recipient, with the platform itself unable to read them.
The company states that this encrypted chat feature is enabled by default, and in-app notifications within WhatsApp indicate that "only participants in this chat can view, listen to, or share" the message content.
The plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. federal district court in San Francisco, allege that Meta Platforms' privacy claims are entirely false. They contend that Meta and WhatsApp "store, analyze, and have access to nearly all user communications that are supposed to be 'private'," and accuse both companies and their management of defrauding billions of WhatsApp users worldwide.
Meta Platforms, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, has dismissed the lawsuit as "baseless" through a spokesperson, who added that the company would seek sanctions against the plaintiffs' legal team.
Spokesperson Andy Stone stated in an email, "Any claim that WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is completely false and a fallacy. For a decade, WhatsApp has used the Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption. This lawsuit is entirely without merit."
The plaintiffs, who hail from countries including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, allege that Meta Platforms stores substantive information from user communications and that its employees can access this content.
The court filing mentions that relevant information was disclosed with the assistance of a "whistleblower," but it does not identify the individual.
