New Breach of Privacy Lawsuit Alleges Meta Accesses and Stores WhatsApp Chats

Another day, another lawsuit. And it’s Meta under fire again in a lawsuit filed in US District Court in San Francisco, CA late last month by a group international plaintiffs who allege that Meta Platforms, Inc. and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.”

The problem is that Meta and WhatsApp claim that their “end-to-end encryption” (allegedly turned on as a default setting) makes messages sent through the WhatsApp application only accessible to sender and recipient, and not to the company.

Jake Bleiberg of Insurance Journal highlights some key points in the lawsuit:

• “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.”

  
  

• “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.’”

As investigators, we keep a pulse on anything and everything social media related; we’ll be keeping an eye on this case.

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