Meta is facing a fresh legal challenge that directly questions one of the most important promises behind WhatsApp: end to end encryption. A newly filed lawsuit claims the company has misled users by suggesting their messages are fully private, while allegedly retaining the ability to store, analyze, and access WhatsApp communications that are marketed as secure.
The complaint has been brought by a group of users from several countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. At the center of the case is the allegation that Meta’s public messaging around WhatsApp privacy does not align with how the platform actually operates. According to the plaintiffs, Meta has created a false sense of security by repeatedly reassuring users that their conversations remain inaccessible to the company.
WhatsApp introduced end to end encryption across all chats in 2016, positioning it as a core feature of the app. Since then, the messaging service has consistently highlighted this protection as a reason users can trust the platform with sensitive conversations. Inside encrypted chats, users are shown a notice stating that only participants in the conversation can read or listen to shared messages, reinforcing the idea that even WhatsApp itself cannot see the content.
The lawsuit disputes that claim. The filing argues that Meta can, in practice, access messages exchanged within supposedly encrypted conversations. It also points to unnamed whistleblowers who allegedly helped expose internal practices that contradict WhatsApp’s public statements, though the complaint does not reveal their identities or provide detailed technical evidence of how such access occurs.
According to reporting by Bloomberg, the plaintiffs believe Meta’s control over WhatsApp infrastructure allows the company to bypass or undermine encryption claims in ways users are not made aware of. The lawsuit was filed in a US District Court and seeks to challenge how privacy assurances are presented to WhatsApp’s global audience.
Meta has strongly rejected the accusations. A company spokesperson described the lawsuit as frivolous and said Meta intends to pursue sanctions against the legal team representing the plaintiffs. The spokesperson insisted that WhatsApp messages have been protected using the Signal protocol for roughly a decade and dismissed any suggestion that Meta can read user messages as false.
“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically untrue,” the spokesperson said, adding that the allegations amount to fiction rather than fact. Meta maintains that neither it nor WhatsApp employees can view the contents of encrypted messages exchanged between users.
The legal team behind the complaint is seeking class action status, a move that could significantly expand the case. If approved, the lawsuit could potentially represent WhatsApp’s user base of more than two billion people worldwide, raising the stakes around how digital privacy claims are regulated and enforced.
As scrutiny around data privacy continues to grow globally, the case adds new pressure on Meta to defend not only WhatsApp’s technical safeguards but also the way those safeguards are communicated to users who rely on the app for private conversations.
