Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the popular messaging app of falsely claiming that chats are inaccessible to third parties Published 24 May, 2026 03:54 © Jonathan Raa / NurPhoto via Getty Images Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed what he described as a lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of that WhatsApp messages are encrypted and inaccessible to third parties, including its own employees. The messaging app, acquired by Meta in 2014, states on its website that On Thursday, the Texas Attorney General’s office announced that Paxton had initiated legal proceedings against Meta, accusing the company of having for WhatsApp. The lawsuit argues that Meta’s promotional materials claiming that it uses end-to-end encryption The Texas Attorney General’s office, citing media reports and whistleblower accounts, argued that those claims were and amounted to a Commenting on the lawsuit, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has vowed that the company would fight it and insisted that “WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false.” Pavel Durov, the founder of rival messaging app Telegram, wrote on X that “now we know what WhatsApp’s founder meant when he said he ‘sold his users’ privacy’.” In a 2018 interview with Forbes, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton admitted: “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise,” referring to the sale of the messaging app to what was then known as Facebook for $22 billion four years prior. Durov previously charged that “you’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026,” claiming that the Telegram team had “found multiple attack vectors” in its encryption. The entrepreneur’s 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’s default end-to-end encryption. The plaintiffs, citing unspecified whistleblowers, alleged that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that the US federal authorities had for some time been investigating similar allegations.
