Lawsuit Claims Meta Can See WhatsApp Chats in Breach of Privacy

An international group of plaintiffs sued Meta Platforms, Inc. alleging that the company has made false claims about the privacy and security of its WhatsApp chat service.

Meta has made so called “end-to-end” encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set, offering a kind of encryption that means a message is only accessible to the sender and recipient, but not the company.

In this kind of encrypted chat, which the company says is turned on by default, WhatsApp’s in-app messaging says “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” the messages.

In the lawsuit filed Friday in ...