An international group of users has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc., alleging that the company misled billions of WhatsApp users about message privacy and falsely claimed that chats were “end-to-end” encrypted.

Meta has rejected the claims, describing the lawsuit as unfounded.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday in a United States District Court in San Francisco, contests Meta’s longstanding assertion that WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted and beyond the company’s reach, according to Bloomberg.

End-to-end encryption has been a key feature of WhatsApp’s privacy claims.

Meta has consistently stated that this encryption ensures messages can only be read by the sender and recipient, making them inaccessible even to WhatsApp and its parent company.

Inside the app, WhatsApp tells users that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” their messages, adding that the feature is enabled by default, the report added.

A note to this effect even appears at the beginning of every chat in the app.

The plaintiffs contend that these assurances do not accurately reflect how the service operates.

The complaint alleges that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ supposedly ‘private’ communications.” The lawsuit accuses the companies and their executives of defrauding users worldwide by promoting WhatsApp as a private messaging service.

The plaintiffs, hailing from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, claim that Meta retains the content of user messages and allows employees to access them.

The filing also cites “whistleblowers” who allegedly exposed these practices, though it does not identify them or detail their involvement.
Meta has firmly denied the claims, calling the lawsuit baseless.

A company spokesperson, noting that Meta acquired WhatsApp in 2014, said the firm intends to vigorously contest the case.

The spokesperson described the lawsuit as “frivolous” and stated that Meta “will seek sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.”

“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email, cited by Bloomberg. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”