A lawsuit has been filed in the San Francisco federal court against Meta Platforms, where an international group of plaintiffs claims that the company misled WhatsApp users regarding the privacy of their messages. This was reported by Bloomberg.
The complaint states that Meta and WhatsApp "store, analyze, and have the ability to access almost all WhatsApp chats that are marketed as private." The plaintiffs accuse the company and its leadership of fraud affecting billions of users.
Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, dismissed these allegations. Company representative Andy Stone called the lawsuit "nonsensical" and stated that the company would seek sanctions against the plaintiffs' lawyers. He asserted that claims of a lack of encryption are "categorically false and absurd." Stone emphasized that WhatsApp has been using the Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption for ten years, which ensures that only the sender and recipient can access the messages.
The lawsuit was filed by citizens from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. The document claims that Meta retains message content and that company employees can access it. Whistleblowers are mentioned as sources of information, but their names are not disclosed.
It is worth noting that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is continuing its legal battle against Meta over its monopoly in the social media market. The regulator insists that Meta maintains dominance in the personal social networking market through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.