The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, which is used by more than 3 billion people, does not provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) that it has long claimed.
Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said that WhatsApp offers strong end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on the sender’s device with keys that are available only to the recipient. By definition, E2EE means that no one—including the platform—can read the plaintext messages.
In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta “doesn’t see any content in WhatsApp; it’s completely encrypted” and “Facebook systems don’t see the content of messages being transferred to WhatsApp.” The engine of this E2EE is the Signal Protocol, an open source code base that many third-party experts have said lives up to its promises.
In a complaint filed Thursday, lawyers for the Texas AG said Meta’s claims are false and that the company can and does read the unencrypted content of WhatsApp messages. They said they are taking action to prevent WhatsApp and Meta from deliberately deceiving [Texans] By misrepresenting that their private communications were absolutely private and inaccessible even to WhatsApp and Meta – when, in fact, WhatsApp and Meta have access to all WhatsApp users’ communications.”
“The seriousness of the violation of users’ privacy and trust by Meta and WhatsApp cannot be underestimated,” the lawyers wrote. “All users had the right to believe that their communications were private when WhatsApp and Meta had clearly and repeatedly promised that no one – not even WhatsApp and Meta – could access their messages.”
In an email, Meta called the allegations “baseless” and vowed to fight the case in court.
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The only factual evidence cited for the claims is an article published last month by Bloomberg. It reported that the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security had abruptly closed its investigation into allegations that Meta could access encrypted WhatsApp messages shortly after one of the department’s agents sent an email outlining the preliminary findings of the investigation.
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