January 26, 2026 – On January 25 local time, Bloomberg reported that Meta is facing a lawsuit from an international group of plaintiffs. The plaintiffs accuse Meta of making false claims regarding the privacy and security features of WhatsApp.
The crux of the lawsuit centers on WhatsApp’s “end – to – end encryption” function. For a long time, Meta has touted end – to – end encryption as a key selling point of WhatsApp, asserting that only the sender and the receiver can read the messages and that the company has no access to the content. Inside the WhatsApp application, there are clear prompts stating that “only the two people in the chat can read, listen to, or share” the relevant information, and this encryption is enabled by default.
However, the plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Federal District Court in San Francisco last Friday local time, claiming that these privacy promises are false. They allege that Meta and WhatsApp are actually “storing and analyzing” the content of users’ communications and have “almost full access to all so – called ‘private’ exchanges,” thus deceiving billions of WhatsApp users worldwide.
A Meta spokesperson vehemently denied the allegations, calling the lawsuit “baseless.” The company said it would seek sanctions against the plaintiffs’ lawyers. According to the spokesperson, WhatsApp has been using the Signal protocol to implement end – to – end encryption for a decade, and any claim that the messages are not encrypted is “completely wrong and absurd.”
The plaintiffs hail from multiple countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. They claim that Meta retains users’ communication content and that company insiders may also have access to this information. The lawsuit mentions that “whistleblowers” played a role in exposing the situation, but their specific identities were not disclosed.
It was learned from the report that the plaintiffs’ lawyers hope the court will certify the case as a class – action lawsuit.
