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MARSHALL, Texas (CN) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued WhatsApp and its parent company Meta Thursday, claiming that WhatsApp has falsely represented that its users’ messages are kept completely private, including from the platform itself.
In actuality, Paxton claims, WhatsApp and Meta can view virtually all communications sent through the platform.
WhatsApp, which was purchased by Meta in 2014, is a widely used social media platform that allows users to send messages and make voice and video calls over the internet.
WhatsApp advertises that it uses end-to-end encryption to keep users’ communications private from everyone except messages’ senders and recipients and that no one else — including WhatsApp itself — can view users’ communications.
But in a complaint filed in Harrison County District Court, Paxton claims these representations are false.
“Texans deserve to know whether their private communications are indeed truly private,” Paxton said in a statement. “WhatsApp markets its services as secure and encrypted, but it does not deliver on those promises. I am suing to protect Texans’ privacy and ensure that WhatsApp by Meta does not mislead Texans by unlawfully accessing private conversations and data.”
Paxton claims Meta and WhatsApp have violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by making false claims about the privacy of WhatsApp messages. He seeks an injunction preventing the companies from accessing Texans’ WhatsApp communications without their consent as well as $10,000 in civil penalties per DTPA violation.
He bases his claims on an article published by Bloomberg in April. Bloomberg reported that an investigator with the Office of Export Enforcement, an agency in the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, found that “Meta can and does view and store all the text messages, photographs, audio and video recordings” WhatsApp users send.
“There is no limit to the type of WhatsApp message that can be viewed by Meta,” the agent reportedly wrote in a January email to officials at other agencies summarizing his preliminary findings.
In a statement to Courthouse News Service, a spokesperson for Meta denied that WhatsApp can access its users’ encrypted messages, saying that “any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
The Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, but Bloomberg reported that the bureau the agent worked for dismissed his claims as “unsubstantiated and outside the scope of his authority as an export enforcement agent.”
Bloomberg also reported that the agent spent much of last year investigating claims that some Meta employees and contractors can view WhatsApp users’ encrypted messages.
The agent reportedly found that since at least 2019 Meta has operated a “tiered permissions system” where different people are given varying levels of access to WhatsApp content and that this access extends to contractors and a “significant number of foreign/overseas workers in India.”
“The misconduct of Meta and its officers, including current and former high-level executives, involve civil and criminal violations that span several federal jurisdictions," the agent reportedly wrote in his email.
Sources reportedly told Bloomberg that soon after the agent sent the email, the agency he worked for abruptly closed the investigation.
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