Meta Platforms, Inc. has been hit with a lawsuit in the United States by an international group of plaintiffs accusing the company of misleading WhatsApp users about the privacy of their messages.
The suit, filed on Friday at a US District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta’s repeated assurances that WhatsApp chats are protected by end-to-end encryption are false.
According to the plaintiffs, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.”
WhatsApp has long promoted end-to-end encryption as a key security feature, insisting that messages can only be accessed by the sender and recipient.
The platform tells users that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” messages, and states that the feature is enabled by default.
However, the plaintiffs argue that these privacy statements amount to deception, claiming Meta which acquired WhatsApp in 2014 and its executives defrauded billions of users worldwide through what they describe as misleading claims about message security.
Meta has denied the allegations and dismissed the lawsuit as baseless.
A company spokesperson, Andy Stone, described the case as “frivolous” and said Meta would pursue sanctions against the plaintiffs’ legal team.
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” 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.”
The plaintiffs include individuals from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, and the complaint alleges that Meta stores the content of user communications and that employees can access them.
The filing also references “whistleblowers” as sources of the claims, though no individuals were identified.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs are seeking class action status, potentially expanding the case to cover a wider group of WhatsApp users.
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.
