By Naomi Jeremiah

Meta Platforms, Inc. is facing a high-stakes international lawsuit alleging that its long-standing promises of “unbreakable” privacy on WhatsApp are false. An international group of plaintiffs filed the class-action suit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming that the company’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a “sham” designed to mislead billions of users.

The 51-page complaint, first reported by Bloomberg, involves plaintiffs from India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. They argue that despite Meta’s frequent in-app notifications stating that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” messages, the company maintains internal tools that allow employees to access and analyze supposedly private communications.

At the heart of the lawsuit is a startling claim involving internal Meta systems. According to the filing, Meta employees can reportedly bypass encryption by submitting a simple “task” request to the engineering team.

The lawsuit alleges that:

• Bypass Tools: Engineers can grant access to a specialized “widget” linked to a user’s unique ID, allowing workers to view messages in nearly real-time.
• Persistent Storage: The plaintiffs claim Meta stores the substance of user communications and that this access is “unlimited in temporal scope,” potentially including messages that users believe they have deleted.
• Data Analysis: The suit alleges that Meta “stores, analyzes, and can access virtually all” of the messages to fuel its data-driven business model.

Meta has hit back aggressively against the allegations. Company spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the lawsuit as “categorically false and absurd,” noting that WhatsApp has used the industry-standard Signal Protocol for a decade.

“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction,” Stone said in a statement. Meta also indicated it would seek legal sanctions against the plaintiffs’ counsel for filing what it calls a meritless case.

WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart also weighed in on social media, describing the lawsuit as a “headline-seeking” effort brought by law firms that have previously defended spyware companies. He reaffirmed that because encryption keys are stored exclusively on users’ devices, Meta technically cannot read the messages.

The lawsuit follows a 2025 complaint by former Meta security head Attaullah Baig, who alleged that approximately 1,500 engineers had unrestricted access to user data. These claims have recently been amplified by tech figures like Elon Musk, who took to X (formerly Twitter) this week to claim “WhatsApp is not secure” while promoting his own platform’s messaging alternatives.

Culled from: Theeconomictimes