Meta can access WhatsApp chats, claims lawsuit in US

New Delhi: A lawsuit against Meta in the US has alleged that its privacy claims are false and Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyse, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ ‘private’ communications” -- a claim that has been dismissed by the company as a "frivolous work of fiction". 

A group of plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in US District Court in San Francisco, accused the social media giant and their leaders of “defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide”.

The group includes plaintiffs from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa. Plaintiffs are now seeking the court to certify a class-action suit.

They alleged that Meta stores the substance of users’ communications and that workers can get access to them, according to reports.

Meta said that the lawsuit is “frivolous” and they will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.

“Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd. WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction,” according to a Meta spokesperson.

Founded by Ukrainian immigrants to America, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, in 2009, WhatsApp was acquired by social media giant Facebook (now Meta) for $19 billion in 2014.

At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that the acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision.

Famous for its ‘end-to-end’ encryption, WhatsApp was officially launched in November 2009 as a chat app service, initially just for iOS. In August 2010, WhatsApp released an app for Android users. It took 4 years for the messenger app to hit a milestone of 200 million monthly active users.

WhatsApp is reported to have more than 3 billion monthly active users globally, including 100 million in the US.

It is ranked as the most popular mobile messenger app in the world.