Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, has firmly rejected allegations that Meta is secretly accessing user messages. He described a recent lawsuit as “totally false” and motivated by a desire for attention. Cathcart emphasized that the platform’s end-to-end encryption safeguards user messages by preventing Meta from accessing the encryption keys stored on users’ devices. The lawsuit, which has been filed by users across several countries, lacks technical evidence to support its claims and suggests that an internal system can circumvent the encryption protocols.
Meta Employees Allegedly Bypass WhatsApp Encryption
A recent complaint has surfaced, alleging that Meta employees can access any user’s WhatsApp messages through an internal system, undermining the encryption that has been a central privacy feature for the platform for nearly a decade.
According to the 51-page legal filing, employees reportedly need to submit a “task” to a Meta engineer. This request allegedly grants them access to a tool that retrieves messages in “almost real-time” using the user’s ID number.
This claim raises significant concerns regarding user privacy and the effectiveness of WhatsApp’s encryption protocols, which are designed to protect users’ communications from unauthorized access.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov piled on from the other direction, tweeting: “You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026.
WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart has hit back at claims that Meta can secretly read users’ private messages, calling them “totally false” and taking a direct shot at Elon Musk and a lawsuit he says was filed by lawyers who previously defended spyware company NSO Group. “WhatsApp can’t read messages because the encryption keys are stored on your phone and we don’t have access to them,” Cathcart wrote on X. Elon Musk On EU Radar; X’s AI Chatbot Grok Faces Biggest Probe Over Sexual Deepfakes | Details The plaintiffs claim this access is “unlimited in temporal scope,” stretching back to when users first activated their accounts. It mentions “courageous whistleblowers” without identifying them or explaining how they obtained this information. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called the allegations “categorically false and absurd” and said the company would pursue sanctions against the plaintiffs’ legal team. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction,” Stone said. The case arrives months after WhatsApp’s former security head Attaullah Baig filed a separate lawsuit claiming he faced retaliation for trying to address “systemic cybersecurity failures” at the company.
The response came after Musk posted on X that “WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use X Chat”—a statement that coincided with a lawsuit filed Friday in a San Francisco federal court by users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa. “This is a no-merit, headline-seeking lawsuit brought by the very same firm defending NSO after their spyware attacked journalists and government officials. But the lawsuit doesn’t include technical evidence to support these claims. “WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its ‘encryption,’ we found multiple attack vectors. Lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman, who filed the suit, are seeking class-action status and damages on behalf of WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide.