Lawsuit Claims Meta Can See WhatsApp Chats in Breach of Privacy
(Bloomberg) — An international group of plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc., alleging the company made false claims about the privacy and security of its WhatsApp chat service.
Meta has made so-called “end-to-end” encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set, offering a type of encryption that means a message can only be accessed by the sender and recipient, but not the company.
In such encrypted chats, which the company says are on by default, WhatsApp’s in-app messages say “only people in this chat can read, listen to or share messages.”
In the lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the plaintiff group claims Meta’s privacy claims are false. They claim that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and access nearly all of WhatsApp users’ so-called ‘private’ communications,” and accuse the companies and their leaders of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide.
A spokesman for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said the company would “take enforcement action against the plaintiffs’ attorney.”
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” spokesman Andy Stone said in an email. “WhatsApp has been encrypted end-to-end using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a meaningless work of fiction.”
The group, which includes plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, alleges that Meta stores the content of users’ communications and that employees can access them.
The complaint states that “whistleblowers” helped bring this information to light, but does not disclose who they were.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers are asking the court to file a class-action lawsuit. Several attorneys from the firms Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman named in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Another attorney for the plaintiff, Jay Barnett of the Barnett Law Firm, declined to comment Saturday night.
–With help from Kurt Wagner.
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