WhatsApp in hot water: Meta sued over privacy claims, company calls allegations 'baseless'
New Delhi (The Uttam Hindu): A lawsuit has been filed in the United States against the company Meta, alleging that WhatsApp's privacy claims are untrue. The lawsuit alleges that Meta and WhatsApp store, analyze, and, if necessary, access users' private chats.
However, Meta has completely rejected these allegations and said that this case is completely baseless and fabricated.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta and its top executives defrauded billions of WhatsApp users worldwide.
The lawsuit also includes individuals from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, who want the court to treat the case as a class-action suit, so that all affected users can be heard together.
The lawsuit also alleges that Meta keeps all the chat data of its users and some of the company's employees can also access these messages.
Responding to these allegations, Meta said that this lawsuit is completely baseless and the company will also take legal action against it.
A Meta spokesperson said that claiming that WhatsApp messages are not secure is completely false and absurd. They explained that WhatsApp has had end-to-end encryption for the past ten years, based on the Signal Protocol. This means that no one except the sender and receiver can read the messages.
WhatsApp was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton in the US in 2009. Later, in 2014, Facebook (now Meta) acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion.
In 2014, during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that buying WhatsApp was a decision linked to the company's Internet.org vision.
WhatsApp is known for its end-to-end security. The app was first launched for iOS in November 2009 and was made available for Android users in 2010.
Within just four years, WhatsApp surpassed 200 million monthly users. Today, WhatsApp has more than 3 billion monthly active users worldwide, with over 100 million of these users in the United States. WhatsApp is considered the world's most popular mobile messaging app.