The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the companyâs WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesnât provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed.
Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a senderâs device with keys that are available only to the receiver’s. By definition, E2EE means that no one elseâincluding the platform itselfâcan read the plaintext messages.
In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does ânot see any of the content in WhatsApp; it is fully encryptedâ and that âFacebook systems do not see the content of messages being transferred over WhatsApp.â The engine for this E2EE is the Signal protocol, an open source code base that multiple third-party experts have said lives up to its promises.