WhatsApp Privacy End-to-end Encryption: A group of plaintiffs from different countries, including India, has sued Meta Platforms, Inc. They say the company
made false statements about the privacy and security of WhatsApp chats. According to a Bloomberg report, the lawsuit was filed on Friday in a US District Court in San Francisco. The group claims that Meta’s statements about privacy are not true. They say Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications” — and they accuse the companies and their leaders of cheating WhatsApp’s billions of users around the world, the report added. What Meta Said? The Bloomberg report also quoted a spokesperson for Meta, who called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said that the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.” “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” spokesperson Andy Stone said in an email. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction.” The group includes people from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa who are suing Meta. They claim that Meta keeps the actual content of users’ messages and that company workers can look at them, the report said. The complaint says “whistleblowers” helped reveal this information, but it does not name who they are. The lawyers for the people suing want the court to approve this as a class-action lawsuit. Several lawyers from the firms Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman are named in the case, but they did not reply right away when asked for comment. Another lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jay Barnett from Barnett Legal, said he would not comment on Saturday night, the report added. WhatsApp Encryption Meta bought WhatsApp in 2014 and made end-to-end encryption a key part of the app. This encryption means only the sender and receiver can read or listen to the messages, and WhatsApp or Meta cannot see them. The company says this protection is turned on by default for all chats. When you use the app, it clearly shows that only the people in that chat can read, listen to, or share the messages. As per the information available on WhatsApp’s official website, “WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is used when you chat with another person using WhatsApp Messenger. End-to-end encryption keeps your personal messages and calls between you and the person you’re communicating with. No one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share them. This is because with end-to-end encryption, your messages are secured with a lock, and only the recipient and you have the special key needed to unlock and read them. All of this happens automatically: no need to turn on any special settings to secure your messages.” "End-to-end encrypted chats between you and one other person have their own security code. This code is used to verify that the calls and the messages you send to that chat are end-to-end encrypted. The verification process is optional for end-to-end encrypted chats, and is only used to confirm that the messages and calls you send are end-to-end encrypted."
