A lawsuit was filed in the San Francisco district court on January 23. It claims that WhatsApp and its parent company have the ability to store, analyze, and access almost all users' 'private' messages, despite Meta's assertions that messages are protected by end-to-end encryption.
Meta claims that when using such encryption, access to messages is only available to the sender and the recipient, and WhatsApp users are notified that only chat participants can read, listen to, or forward them.
However, the plaintiffs, including citizens from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, believe that these statements are not true. They argue that Meta retains the content of users' messages and that its employees have access to this information. The lawsuit also mentions anonymous "whistleblowers" who, according to them, confirmed this information. Based on this information, the plaintiffs accuse Meta and its management of fraud against billions of WhatsApp users worldwide.
A Meta representative, Andy Stone, described the lawsuit as "frivolous" and stated that the company would take action against the plaintiffs' lawyers. He categorically rejected the allegations that WhatsApp users' messages are not protected by encryption, calling them absurd. Stone added that WhatsApp has been using the Signal protocol for encryption for ten years and characterized the lawsuit as a "frivolous work of fiction."
