>>24180154

https://uk.pcmag.com/security/162799/lawsuit-alleges-that-whatsapp-has-no-end-to-end-encryption

Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption

The lawsuit cites 'courageous whistleblowers,' but provides no technical evidence. WhatsApp's parent company, Meta, calls the claims 'absurd' and warns that it plans to countersue.

A lawsuit claims that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is a sham, and is demanding damages, but the app’s parent company, Meta, calls the claims "false and absurd."

The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco US district court on Friday and comes from a group of users based in countries such as Australia, Mexico, and South Africa, according to Bloomberg.

As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption.

“A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access—often without any scrutiny at all—and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.

“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated—essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.”

The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims. WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption has long been a major selling point. It means that Meta can’t decrypt and read your messages; the encryption keys are only stored on the devices that send and receive the messages.

>>24180158

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-25/lawsuit-claims-meta-can-see-whatsapp-chats-in-breach-of-privacy

Lawsuit Claims Meta Can See WhatsApp Chats in Breach of Privacy

An international group of plaintiffs sued Meta Platforms, Inc. alleging that the company has made false claims about the privacy and security of its WhatsApp chat service.

Meta has made so called “end-to-end” encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set, offering a kind of encryption that means a message is only accessible to the sender and recipient, but not the company.

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. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.”

The group, which includes plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, alleges that Meta stores the substance of users’ communications and that workers can get access to them.

The complaint cites “whistleblowers” as having helped bring this information to light, though it doesn’t explain who they are.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs are asking the court to certify a class-action suit. Multiple attorneys listed in the suit from the firms of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Another one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, Jay Barnett, from Barnett Legal, declined to comment Saturday night.