A group of users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa filed a class-action lawsuit in California against Meta Platforms Inc. and its messaging service WhatsApp, claiming that the company is misrepresenting the security and privacy of communications on the platform. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco District Court, focuses on what users see as a core component of WhatsApp: end-to-end encryption.
WhatsApp has long emphasized that messages have end-to-end encryption, meaning that only the sender and receiver can read, listen to or share the messages, and that no third party can access the content. This is clearly highlighted in the application to users as a security feature of the service.
However, the lawsuit claims that those statements are untrue and that Meta actually “stores, analyzes and can access virtually all allegedly private communications” of WhatsApp users, including the content of messages. The plaintiffs claim that such promises led them to believe that their communications were completely private, while the reality was allegedly different.
The lawsuit also states that some of that information was “discovered” with the help of whistleblowers, although the publicly submitted documents did not reveal details about who those sources were or what they specifically revealed. Prosecutors are asking the court to recognize the case as a class action, which could cover millions of WhatsApp users worldwide.
Meta strongly denied these allegations. A company spokesperson called the lawsuit “frivolous and without merit” (frivolous), stressing that claims that WhatsApp does not use encryption are “categorically incorrect and absurd”. Meta reiterates that WhatsApp has been using end-to-end encryption based on the Signal protocol for ten years, and that the company cannot read users’ messages.
The case comes at a time when privacy in digital communications is under increasing pressure from the public and regulators, and major tech companies, including Meta, are increasingly facing criticism and legal action related to data processing and transparency policies. In addition to this lawsuit, Meta has been the subject of other investigations and fines over WhatsApp’s privacy policy in various jurisdictions over the past few years.
If the court recognizes the lawsuit as a class action, it could have serious consequences for WhatsApp’s reputation and Meta’s wider image, as the debate over what encryption really means for users would be at the center of the legal process, an issue that concerns not only the company’s promises, but also the expectations of billions of users around the world, reports Yahoo Finance.