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An international group of plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc., accusing the company of making false and misleading claims about the privacy and security of WhatsApp chats, according to a Bloomberg report.

The suit, lodged in the US District Court in San Francisco, challenges Meta’s long-standing assertion that WhatsApp messages are fully protected by end-to-end encryption and cannot be accessed by the company. WhatsApp has consistently promoted end-to-end encryption as a core feature, stating that it is enabled by default and assuring users inside chat windows that only the participants in the conversation can read, listen to, or share messages.

Meta has repeatedly emphasised that such encryption ensures messages remain visible solely to the sender and receiver.

Meta Called Out for Alleged Misleading Claims on WhatsApp Privacy

However, the plaintiffs argue that these claims are false. The complaint asserts that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyse, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications,” contradicting the platform’s public statements. The lawsuit accuses Meta and its leadership of misleading billions of WhatsApp users across the world.

Meta has dismissed the allegations as baseless, with spokesperson Andy Stone saying the company will seek sanctions against the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. Stone strongly rejected the claims, calling them “categorically false and absurd,” and reaffirmed that WhatsApp has used end-to-end encryption through the Signal protocol for the past decade.

He also described the complaint as a “frivolous work of fiction.”

The group of plaintiffs includes WhatsApp users from countries such as Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. The lawsuit alleges that Meta stores user communications and that company employees have the ability to access them.

It also references information attributed to unnamed whistleblowers, though their identities and specific roles remain unclear. The plaintiffs’ legal team has asked the court to approve the case as a class-action lawsuit.

Several attorneys from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman, who were named in the filing, did not respond to media inquiries, while another plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jay Barnett of Barnett Legal, declined to comment, according to the Bloomberg report.

Summary:

A global group of plaintiffs has sued Meta, alleging WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption claims are misleading and that the company can access user communications. Meta rejects the accusations as false and “absurd.” The suit, involving users from multiple countries, seeks class-action status and cites unnamed whistleblowers without revealing their identities.

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