“An international group of plaintiffs has sued Meta Corporation, alleging that the company has the technical ability to read, analyze and store the content of private messages on WhatsApp, despite public claims of end-to-end encryption.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Source: Bloomberg
Details: The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco District Court, alleges that Meta’s promises of privacy are false. The plaintiffs insist: the company misleads billions of users, creating the illusion of complete security of correspondence.
Advertising:
The key allegation is that Meta and WhatsApp actually “store, analyze and can access virtually all of users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” The plaintiffs argue that the tech giant’s employees have access to the content of the correspondence, not just the metadata.
This information, according to the text of the complaint, is confirmed by unnamed “whistleblowers”, on whose testimony the lawsuit is based. Lawyers are seeking to declare the case a class action on behalf of affected users from around the world, including the US, India, Brazil and Mexico.
Straight talk from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone: “Any claims that WhatsApp messages are unencrypted are categorically false and absurd. WhatsApp has been using Signal end-to-end encryption for ten years. This lawsuit is a ridiculous fabrication.”
Details: Meta has vowed to seek sanctions against the plaintiffs’ lawyers for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit that the company says is legally unfounded.
For reference: End-to-end encryption is a key marketing feature of WhatsApp. The application itself constantly displays a message that “only people in this chat can read, listen or share” messages, and the company itself allegedly does not have technical access to them.
Prehistory:
- In 2021, a high-profile investigation by ProPublica revealed that Meta employs thousands of moderators who review messages from WhatsApp users. Although the company claimed that it only affected messages that other users complained about, the investigation showed that moderators were getting access to an unencrypted copy of the message and the previous context of the correspondence.
- Also in 2021, WhatsApp was at the center of a scandal over a privacy policy update that required users to share metadata with parent company Facebook. Although the content of the messages themselves officially remained encrypted, Meta gained the right to collect information about who, how often and when users communicate, as well as data about their transactions and IP addresses.
- In addition, cyber security experts have repeatedly pointed out that backup copies of chats that users store in the cloud services Google Drive or iCloud have not been encrypted by default for a long time. This allowed secret services or hackers to access the history of correspondence, bypassing the end-to-end encryption of the application itself.