A group of users filed a lawsuit on Friday in a U.S. district court in San Francisco, alleging Meta misrepresents WhatsApp encryption and seeking damages, according to the legal filing (filed). The plaintiffs say they come from Australia, Mexico, South Africa and India and call the app’s end-to-end encryption a sham.
Meta pushed back on the claim via its communications director Andy Stone, who posted that the allegation is false and called the suit a “frivolous work of fiction.” “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” he wrote.
Meta also notes on its help page that end-to-end encryption protects privacy by ensuring only users can read their messages, stating “End-to-end encryption helps protect your privacy by ensuring no one sees your messages except you.”
Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, publicly supported the lawsuit and said his team found weaknesses when analyzing WhatsApp’s implementation. “You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its ‘encryption’, we found multiple attack vectors.”
The lawsuit arrives as users increasingly adopt decentralized messengers such as Bitchat, which uses Bluetooth mesh networks for offline encrypted messaging. The Jack Dorsey-launched app and others now see more downloads in countries facing social restrictions and disasters.
Other decentralized options with end-to-end encryption include Session and X-Messenger, which advertise private, encrypted communication.
