Billionaire Elon Musk and Telegram CEO Pavel Durov have publicly reacted to a new lawsuit filed against Meta which alleges that WhatsApp users' private messages are not as secure as the company has long claimed.
According to a report in Top Class Actions, a class action lawsuit has been filed against WhatsApp, Meta Platforms Inc., Accenture PLC and Accenture LLP. They are accusing them of wrongfully intercepting and sharing private WhatsApp messages with third parties.
Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), reacted to the allegations by posting on the platform, “Can't trust WhatsApp.”
He, in another post, added, “Use ???? Chat for messaging and voice/video calls. Comes with this great benefit of actual privacy.”
Telegram CEO Durov also weighed in and called WhatsApp's encryption claims misleading: “WhatsApp's “encryption” may be the biggest consumer fraud in history — deceiving billions of users. Despite its claims, it reads users' messages and shares them with third parties. Telegram has never done this — and never will.”
The lawsuit claims that WhatsApp and its parent company Meta marketed the messaging platform as a secure, end-to-end encrypted service where users could communicate privately. But the complaint alleges that in reality the platform “intercepted, read, stored, accessed and/or viewed” private messages sent by users, often without proper disclosure.
The plaintiffs argue that users were led to believe that even WhatsApp itself could not see their messages but that this promise was misleading.
“Whistleblowers have informed federal investigators that Meta employees and third-party contractors had ‘broad access to the substance of WhatsApp messages that were supposed to be encrypted and inaccessible,'” the class action complaint claims as cited in the report.
The lawsuit further noted that WhatsApp's own marketing reinforced the expectation of privacy, including claims that “not even WhatsApp” could view personal messages.
They also argue that WhatsApp and Meta violated privacy laws by allegedly allowing the companies, their employees, Accenture contractors and other third parties to access the contents of users' private messages without consent.
The plaintiffs are seeking to represent numerous WhatsApp users who sent or received messages between April 5, 2016, and the present, along with proposed subclasses in California and Pennsylvania.
As per the report, the plaintiffs are seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, along with statutory, compensatory, exemplary and punitive damages for users affected by the alleged conduct.
