The Texas Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of misleading users about the end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp messaging platform.
The suit, filed Thursday, claims Meta can read the contents of WhatsApp messages, contradicting years of public statements by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the company does not have access to encrypted communications. Since 2016, Meta has marketed WhatsApp as secure, with messages encrypted from sender to receiver using the Signal protocol.
In a sworn 2018 Senate testimony, Zuckerberg said, “We do not see any of the content in WhatsApp; it is fully encrypted.” The Texas AG’s office contends this is false.
However, the complaint relies heavily on a single Bloomberg report as evidence. Security experts and cryptography researchers have expressed doubt about the lawsuit’s claims, noting that extensive reverse engineering of the WhatsApp client has not revealed any backdoor or breach of encryption.
A 2023 technical analysis by King’s College London gave WhatsApp a clean bill of health regarding encryption, though it noted a design flaw in group membership management. Researchers stress that without access to Meta's server-side code, a definitive assessment is impossible, but no concrete evidence suggests WhatsApp has broken its encryption promise.
Meta has called the allegations "baseless" and vowed to fight the suit. The Texas AG’s office has not provided additional evidence beyond the news article.