Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the popular messaging app of falsely claiming that chats are inaccessible to third parties

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed what he described as a "landmark" lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of "falsely claiming" 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 "no one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share what a user says." 

On Thursday, the Texas Attorney General's office announced that Paxton had initiated legal proceedings against Meta, accusing the company of having "misled consumers regarding the strength and scope of its privacy protections" for WhatsApp.

The lawsuit argues that Meta's promotional materials claiming that it uses end-to-end encryption "have led millions of users to believe their communications are fully private." 

The Texas Attorney General's office, citing media reports and whistleblower accounts, argued that those claims were "blatantly inaccurate" and amounted to a "complete and total misrepresentation of Meta's privacy policies." 

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.