Texas AG sues Meta over claims WhatsApp fails to provide end-to-end encryption

The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company's WhatsApp messaging service, used by more than 3 billion people, does not provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed.

Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has claimed that WhatsApp provides strong end-to-end encryption, meaning messages are encrypted on the sender's device with keys available only to the recipient's device. By definition, E2EE means that no one else, including the platform itself, can read messages in the clear.

In sworn testimony before two U.S. Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta “doesn’t see any content from WhatsApp; it is fully encrypted” and that “Facebook systems do not see the content of messages transferred via WhatsApp”. Powering this E2EE is the Signal protocol, an open source codebase that several third-party experts believe delivers on its promises.

In a complaint filed Thursday, lawyers for Texas AG said Meta's claims were false and that the company could and does read the unencrypted content of WhatsApp messages. They said they were filing the suit to “prevent WhatsApp and Meta from continuing to deliberately deceive [Texans] by falsely claiming that their private communications were just that – private and inaccessible even to WhatsApp and Meta – when in fact WhatsApp and Meta have access to all WhatsApp user communications in their entirety.”

“The severity of Meta and WhatsApp’s violation of user privacy and trust cannot be overstated,” the lawyers wrote. “All users were entitled to believe that their communications were private when WhatsApp and Meta unequivocally 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 lawsuit in court.

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The only factual evidence cited to support these claims is an article published last month by Bloomberg. It reported that the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security abruptly closed an investigation into allegations that Meta could access encrypted WhatsApp messages shortly after one of the department's officers sent an email describing the investigation's preliminary findings.