(SeaPRwire) – Attorney General Ken Paxton has charged the widely used messaging app with falsely claiming that user chats cannot be accessed by third parties
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed what he calls a “landmark” lawsuit against Meta, claiming the company made “false claims” that WhatsApp messages are encrypted and off-limits to third parties, including Meta’s own employees.
The messaging app, which Meta purchased back in 2014, notes on its official website that “no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share what a user says.”
On Thursday, the Texas Attorney General’s office made public that Paxton had launched legal proceedings against Meta, accusing the firm of having “misled consumers regarding the strength and scope of its privacy protections” for WhatsApp.
The lawsuit argues that Meta’s promotional content claiming it uses end-to-end encryption “have led millions of users to believe their communications are fully private.”
The Texas Attorney General’s office, referencing media reports and testimonies from whistleblowers, stated those claims were “blatantly inaccurate” and counted as a “complete and total misrepresentation of Meta’s privacy policies.”
Speaking about the lawsuit, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has promised the company will fight the case and stood by the assertion that “WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
Pavel Durov, founder of competing messaging platform Telegram, posted on X that “now we know what WhatsApp’s founder meant when he said he ‘sold his users’ privacy’.”
In a 2018 interview with Forbes, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton acknowledged: “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise,” speaking about the 2014 sale of the messaging app to what was then called Facebook, for a total of $22 billion.
Durov has previously claimed that “you’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026,” stating the Telegram team had “found multiple attack vectors” within its encryption framework.
The entrepreneur’s comments were made alongside a major class-action lawsuit filed in a U.S. district court by an international group of plaintiffs against Meta Platforms, centered on WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption.
The plaintiffs, citing unnamed whistleblowers, claim that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.”
Around the same time this lawsuit was filed, Bloomberg reported that U.S. federal authorities had already been investigating similar allegations for quite some time.
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