A group of international users led by Israeli NSO group has initiated a legal challenge against Meta, claiming that WhatsApp’s promised end-to-end encryption is non-existent. The lawsuit relies on whistleblower accounts suggesting that employees can bypass security measures to read private communications in real-time via internal tools. In response, Meta has dismissed these allegations as fictitious and absurd, maintaining that their security protocols remain robust and impenetrable.
Tech side of the story goes that a Meta’s employee need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job, the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access—often without any scrutiny at all—and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.
The lawsuit, however, accuses Meta of trying “to prevent the truth from coming out by imposing onerous nondisclosure agreements on its workers, essentially threatening the full force of one of the world’s richest companies if any of these individuals dared reveal what goes on behind closed doors at the company. These efforts have now failed, but they worked for many, many years by obscuring the truth.”’