Texas Attorney General sued Meta over allegations that WhatsApp fails to provide the end-to-end encryption it has claimed. Meta has said WhatsApp encrypts messages on the sender’s device using keys only available to the receiver, so no one else, including Meta, can read plaintext messages. In 2018 testimony, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does not see WhatsApp message content and that Facebook systems do not see transferred message content. Texas attorneys allege Meta’s claims are false and that Meta can read unencrypted WhatsApp message contents. The lawsuit seeks to stop Meta and WhatsApp from continuing to misrepresent that private communications are inaccessible even to the companies themselves. Meta denies the allegations as baseless and plans to fight the case in court.
"Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a sender's device with keys that are available only to the receiver's. By definition, E2EE means that no one else-including the platform itself-can read the plaintext messages."
"In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does "not see any of the content in WhatsApp; it is fully encrypted" and that "Facebook systems do not see the content of messages being transferred over WhatsApp." The engine for this E2EE is the Signal protocol, an open source code base that multiple third-party experts have said lives up to its promises."
"In a complaint filed Thursday, Texas AG attorneys said Meta's claims are false and that the company can and does read the unencrypted contents of WhatsApp messages. They said they are filing the action to "prevent WhatsApp and Meta from continuing to willfully deceive [Texans] by misrepresenting that their private communications were just that-private and inaccessible even to WhatsApp and Meta-when, in fact, WhatsApp and Meta have access to all WhatsApp users' communications in their entirety.""
""The gravity of Meta's and WhatsApp's violation of users' privacy and trust cannot be overstated," the attorneys wrote. "All users were entitled to believe their communications were private when WhatsApp and Meta unequivocally and repeatedly promised that no one-not even WhatsApp and Meta-can access their messages.""
Read at Ars Technica
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