Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton added WhatsApp to the growing list of companies he has accused of violating Texans’ data privacy, announcing a lawsuit against the messaging app and its parent company, Meta, last week.
The lawsuit states WhatsApp is deceiving its users by claiming to offer “end-to-end encryption,” or a software that conceals the contents of a message to anyone, including the company, except to the sender and receiver. This follows Paxton’s lawsuit against Netflix, also over privacy issues, earlier this month and a recent settlement with smart TV maker LG electronics, all while he pursues the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in a heated runoff against incumbent John Cornyn.
“Texans deserve to know whether their private communications are indeed truly private,” Paxton wrote 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.”
For years, Meta has faced allegations and lawsuits that it can, in fact, view private messages sent on WhatsApp. The company, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, has consistently denied the claims.
“WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false,” Meta spokesperson Rachel Holland wrote in a statement responding to Paxton’s lawsuit. “We will fight this suit as we continue defending our strong record on protecting people’s messages.”
The lawsuit and a news release from Paxton’s office point to whistleblowers that claim Meta does have access to messages sent on the platform.
A federal Commerce Department investigation into Meta and WhatsApp was abruptly closed earlier this year after an agency investigator wrote in a memo that there was “no limit” to the type of WhatsApp messages that could be viewed by Meta, according to Bloomberg.
The lawsuit is being brought under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, the state’s consumer protection law. Paxton argued in the lawsuit that Meta and WhatsApp violated the law by consistently misleading users by claiming in marketing that their communications are encrypted.
The lawsuit, filed in a state district court in Harrison County, asks for a permanent injunction blocking the company from viewing users’ messages without their consent and a $10,000 fine for each violation of the consumer protection law.
Last week’s filing is the latest in a recent series of legal actions by Paxton’s office against big tech companies, accusing them of illegally collecting users’ data.
Paxton sued Netflix on May 11, accusing the streaming platform of collecting users’ data without their knowledge before selling it on to data brokers to be used in targeted advertisements. And last week, Paxton announced his office would investigate Meta over claims that audio and video collected by the company’s Meta Glasses is not as private as the company claims.
In 2024, Meta agreed to pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by Paxton’s office in 2022 that accused the company of using facial recognition technology without users’ consent. Last year, the attorney general’s office secured another $1.4 billion settlement with Google following a 2022 lawsuit that accused the tech giant of collecting users’ data without their consent.
Disclosure: Google has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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