A lawsuit filed on January 23 in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco claims that WhatsApp and Meta have the ability to store, analyze, and access nearly all users' 'private' messages, despite claims of employing end-to-end encryption technology.
Meta representatives insist that only the sender and recipient can read the messages, and that WhatsApp informs users that "only chat participants can read, listen to, or forward them." However, the plaintiffs, which include citizens from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, argue that these statements are not true. They are convinced that Meta accumulates the content of messages and provides access to them to its employees. The lawsuit mentions that information about this fact was provided by anonymous "whistleblowers." In this regard, the plaintiffs accuse Meta and its management of fraud affecting billions of WhatsApp users worldwide.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, characterized the lawsuit as "frivolous" and stated that the company would take action against the plaintiffs' attorneys. He noted that claims that WhatsApp users' messages are not protected by encryption are completely false and absurd. According to him, WhatsApp has been using the Signal protocol for encryption for ten years, and he described the lawsuit as a "frivolous work of fiction."
