Texas Files Lawsuit Against Meta Over WhatsApp Encryption Claims
WhatsApp, acquired by Meta in 2014, prominently states on its website that "no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share what a user says."
Paxton's office announced the legal action on Thursday, accusing Meta of having "misled consumers regarding the strength and scope of its privacy protections" for WhatsApp. The suit contends that the company's promotional materials touting end-to-end encryption "have led millions of users to believe their communications are fully private."
Drawing on media investigations and whistleblower testimony, the Texas Attorney General's office argued those assurances were "blatantly inaccurate" and constituted a "complete and total misrepresentation of Meta's privacy policies."
Meta pushed back immediately. Company spokesperson Andy Stone vowed the company would contest the lawsuit and maintained that "WhatsApp cannot access people's encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false."
The legal filing lands amid a broader wave of scrutiny targeting WhatsApp's privacy architecture. A separate class-action lawsuit, filed in a US district court by an international group of plaintiffs, alleges that Meta and WhatsApp "store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users' purportedly 'private' communications," citing unidentified whistleblowers. Around the same period, media reported that federal authorities had been conducting their own parallel investigation into similar allegations.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov seized on the Texas lawsuit to renew his long-running criticism of the platform, writing on X that "now we know what WhatsApp's founder meant when he said he 'sold his users' privacy'."
The remark was a pointed reference to WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who acknowledged in a 2018 interview with Forbes: "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise" — a reflection on his decision to sell the messaging app to what was then known as Facebook for $22 billion.
Durov had previously gone further, asserting that "you'd have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026," and claiming the Telegram team had "found multiple attack vectors" in the app's encryption — allegations that have intensified pressure on Meta to provide greater transparency over how user data is actually handled.
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