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The Texas Attorney General sued Meta for saying that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, which is used by more than 3 billion people, does not provide the end-to-end (E2EE) voice that it has been saying for a long time.
Since 2016, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has said that WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are stored on the sender’s device with keys available only to the recipient. By definition, E2EE means that no one else – including the platform itself – can read simple messages.
In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg he said Meta “doesn’t see any content in WhatsApp; it’s kept safe” and that “Facebook systems don’t see what’s sent on WhatsApp.” This E2EE engine is the Signal protocol, an open source platform that many third-party experts have said delivers on its promises.
In a complaint filed Thursday, Texas AG lawyers said Meta’s claims are false and that the company can read unwritten content in WhatsApp messages. He added that he is taking action to “prevent WhatsApp and Meta from continuing to deliberately mislead (Texans) by misrepresenting that their private messages were private and inaccessible even to WhatsApp and Meta – whereas, WhatsApp and Meta can communicate with all WhatsApp users.”
“The magnitude of Meta and WhatsApp’s breach of user privacy and trust cannot be understated,” the lawyers wrote. “All users had the right to believe that their messages were private when WhatsApp and Meta clearly 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 evidence cited in the allegations is story published last month by Bloomberg. It also said that the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security abruptly shut down an investigation into Meta’s ability to access encrypted WhatsApp messages shortly after sending an email detailing the investigation’s findings.
