Key Highlights
- In this kind of encrypted chat, which the company says is turned on by default, WhatsApp’s in-app messaging says “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 allege that Meta’s privacy claims are false.
- They allege 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 spokesperson for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said that the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.” “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email.
- “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade.
