Meta Faces Global Lawsuit for WhatsApp Privacy Violations
An international group of plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc., claiming that the company has made misleading assertions regarding the privacy and security of its WhatsApp chat service. Meta has positioned “end-to-end” encryption as a fundamental aspect of WhatsApp’s features, providing a level of security that ensures messages are accessible solely to the sender and recipient, excluding the company from access. In this type of encrypted chat, which the company asserts is enabled by default, WhatsApp’s in-app messaging states, “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” the messages.
In the lawsuit filed Friday in US District Court in San Francisco, the group of plaintiffs asserts that Meta’s privacy claims are misleading. They claim that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications” — and accuse the companies and their leaders of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide. A representative for Meta, the company that acquired WhatsApp in 2014, described the lawsuit as “frivolous” and stated that the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.
Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” said spokesperson Andy Stone in an email. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade.” This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction. The group, comprising plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, claims that Meta retains the content of users’ communications, allowing workers access to this information. The complaint references “whistleblowers” as instrumental in revealing this information, yet it fails to clarify their identities.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys are requesting the court to certify a class-action lawsuit. Several attorneys named in the lawsuit from the firms of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman did not respond promptly to requests for comment. Another one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, Jay Barnett, from Barnett Legal, refrained from providing a comment on Saturday night.
