Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has found itself in a new lawsuit even before the first month of 2026 wrapped up. A group of WhatsApp users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa have reportedly said that Meta’s claim of its widely used WhatsApp messaging app being “end to end encrypted” is not just untrue, but also misleading. In the backdrop of this privacy row, Elon Musk has started trying to get WhatsApp users to switch to X Chat instead.
Meta questioned on WhatsApp privacy
A lawsuit has been filed in the US District Court in San Francisco alleging that Meta and WhatsApp store personal chats of users and analyse them for their benefit, Bloomberg has reported.
Ever since Meta acquired WhatsApp back in February 2014, it has been vouching that WhatsApp messages encrypted from end-to-end and that only people involved in the chat could access and read them.
In the lawsuit that has been filed this month, the plaintiffs have reportedly accused WhatsApp’s privacy-driven marketing of having defrauded its massive userbase of an estimated three billion globally with the encryption promise for years now.
More information on the lawsuit like its court date and possible trajectory remains unclear for now.
Meta jumps on damage control over privacy breach fears
During its “Facebook” days, Meta had found itself in major data breach cases repeatedly. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica breach, in particular, had become scandalous for Zuckerberg’s company that exposed user data of millions to the British consulting firm for political advertising.
This time, the Meta leadership is out there to snip any allegation that could bear defamatory repercussions on the company reputation right in the stem.
After Bloomberg posted its story on X, Meta’s communications chief Andy Stone posted a response addressing the situation.
“This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction. Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Stone said.
Source: X/ @Andymstone
Tech titans support allegations against Meta
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has shown a support to the lawsuit, insinuating that WhatsApp is not end-to-end encrypted.
“You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026,” Durov alleged.
X chief Elon Musk, who has been promoting his X Chat messaging platform, also shared the Bloomberg report saying, “WhatsApp is not secure. Use X Chat”.
Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp at Meta did not resist responding to Musk under his post.
“This is totally false. WhatsApp can’t read messages because the encryption keys are stored on your phone and we don’t have access to them. This is a no-merit, headline-seeking lawsuit,” Cathcart said.
The Pegasus spyware angle
The head of WhatsApp went on to claim that the lawsuit is brought by the “same firm defending the NSO after their spyware attacked journalists and government officials.” This referred to the Pegasus spyware controversy.
The NSO group is the Israeli company that developed the Pegasus spyware — which, in 2022 was accused of having been used illegally to extract personal information of international public figures from the political and journalism space. In 2019, WhatsApp had blamed the NSO group of taking advantage of a vulnerability in its network and deploying Pegasus to get information of over 1,400 users. Since then, WhatsApp and the NSO Group have been in a legal brawl against each other.
Cathcart essentially said that King & Spalding — the law firm representing the NSO Group has orchestrated this lawsuit to favour their client.