{"id":1026,"date":"2026-05-24T04:41:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arabnewsmonitor.com\/2026\/05\/24\/meta-sued-for-misleading-texans-over-whatsapp-privacy\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T04:41:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:41:38","slug":"meta-sued-for-misleading-texans-over-whatsapp-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/?p=1026","title":{"rendered":"Meta sued for \u2018misleading\u2019 Texans over WhatsApp privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the popular messaging app of falsely claiming that chats are inaccessible to third parties<\/strong><\/p>\n

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed what he described as a \u201clandmark\u201d<\/em> lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of \u201cfalsely claiming\u201d<\/em> that WhatsApp messages are encrypted and inaccessible to third parties, including its own employees.<\/p>\n

The messaging app, acquired by Meta in 2014, states on its website that \u201cno one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share what a user says.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the Texas Attorney General\u2019s office announced that Paxton had initiated legal proceedings against Meta, accusing the company of having \u201cmisled consumers regarding the strength and scope of its privacy protections\u201d<\/em> for WhatsApp.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit argues that Meta\u2019s promotional materials claiming that it uses end-to-end encryption \u201chave led millions of users to believe their communications are fully private.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Texas Attorney General\u2019s office, citing media reports and whistleblower accounts, argued that those claims were \u201cblatantly inaccurate\u201d<\/em> and amounted to a \u201ccomplete and total misrepresentation of Meta\u2019s privacy policies.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT
Telegram\u2019s Durov says \u2018your nudes are safe with us\u2019<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Commenting on the lawsuit, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has vowed that the company would fight it and insisted that \u201cWhatsApp cannot access people\u2019s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pavel Durov, the founder of rival messaging app Telegram, wrote on X that \u201cnow we know what WhatsApp\u2019s founder meant when he said he \u2018sold his users\u2019 privacy\u2019.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a 2018 interview with Forbes, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton admitted: \u201cI sold my users\u2019 privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise,\u201d<\/em> referring to the sale of the messaging app to what was then known as Facebook for $22 billion four years prior.<\/p>\n

Durov previously charged that \u201cyou\u2019d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026,\u201d<\/em> claiming that the Telegram team had \u201cfound multiple attack vectors\u201d<\/em> in its encryption.<\/p>\n

The entrepreneur\u2019s comments came amid a major class-action lawsuit filed in a US district court by an international group of plaintiffs against Meta Platforms over WhatsApp\u2019s default end-to-end encryption.<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs, citing unspecified whistleblowers, alleged that Meta and WhatsApp \u201cstore, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users\u2019 purportedly \u2018private\u2019 communications.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that the US federal authorities had for some time been investigating similar allegations.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the popular messaging app of falsely claiming that chats…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arabnewsmonitor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}