Texas Attorney General Paxton Sues WhatsApp for ‘Lying About Privacy’
Texas Attorney General Paxton Sues WhatsApp for ‘Lying About Privacy’
https://www.pcmag.com/news/texas-attorney-general-paxton-sues-whatsapp-for-lying-about-privacy
Publish Date: 2026-05-23 08:25:00
Source Domain: www.pcmag.com
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Meta and WhatsApp, claiming Meta “misled consumers regarding the strength and scope” of WhatsApp’s privacy protections—though encryption experts have criticized his claims.
WhatsApp, like Signal, iMessage, and Telegram’s Secret Chats, provides what is called end-to-end (E2EE) encryption. This means that no one, except the two parties involved, can read the messages, including the company providing the messaging service.
In the official statement, Paxton’s office claims that “investigations and insider accounts” have shown Meta’s claims about being unable to access users’ messages to be “blatantly inaccurate.” He goes on to allege that reports suggest WhatsApp employees have been able to access user communications, and that “message content can be pulled and viewed after the message has been sent.”
“I am suing to protect Texans’ privacy and ensure that WhatsApp by Meta does not mislead Texans by unlawfully accessing private conversations and data,” said Paxton.
The lawsuit invokes the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act (DTPA), which allows individuals and businesses to sue companies for false, misleading, or deceptive business practices.
Benjamin Dowling, a senior lecturer in cryptography at King’s College London and a co-author of the study, criticized the claims in an email to Ars Technica. He said following his team’s reverse-engineering of WhatsApp, “all the evidence we are aware of points towards WhatsApp providing users with end-to-end encryption for their message contents.” Though he did say his team found “weaknesses in the protocol, such as a lack of user control over things like group membership.”
“As it stands, we are not aware of any concrete evidence that WhatsApp has broken their promise of end-to-end encryption,” he added.
Kenny Paterson, a researcher at ETH Zurich, one of Switzerland’s top-ranked universities, called the “vast…
