An international group of WhatsApp users has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc, alleging that the company misled users about the privacy of their messages and falsely claimed that chats on the platform are protected by end-to-end encryption. Meta has denied the allegations, calling the suit baseless.
The complaint was filed on Friday in a US District Court in San Francisco, according to a Bloomberg report. It challenges Meta’s long-standing assertion that WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted and therefore inaccessible to the company itself.
WhatsApp has consistently stated that end-to-end encryption ensures only the sender and recipient can read messages, and that not even WhatsApp or its parent company can access them. Within the app, users are informed that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” messages, with encryption enabled by default.
However, the plaintiffs argue that these assurances do not accurately reflect how the service operates.
According to the lawsuit, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyse, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.”
The filing accuses the companies and their leadership of defrauding users globally by marketing WhatsApp as a private messaging platform while allegedly retaining access to user communications.
The group of plaintiffs includes users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. They claim that Meta stores the content of user messages and that company employees are able to access them. The complaint also refers to unnamed “whistleblowers” who allegedly helped reveal these practices, though no details about their identities or roles are provided.
Meta has rejected the allegations, saying it intends to contest the lawsuit. A company spokesperson described the case as “frivolous” and said Meta would seek sanctions against the plaintiffs’ counsel.
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email cited by Bloomberg.
“WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade.”