Pavel Durov, the Russian tech entrepreneur who created the Telegram messenger app, has claimed there is no doubt WhatsApp lacks any meaningful privacy, after its parent company was hit with a new lawsuit.
In a major class-action lawsuit filed against Meta Platforms, Inc. in a US district court last week, an international group of plaintiffs from countries including Australia, Brazil and India has accused the company of making false claims about the privacy of its WhatsApp service.
“You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026,” Durov posted on X on Monday, mocking suggestions that Meta cannot read users’ messages. “When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its ‘encryption’, we found multiple attack vectors.”
The lawsuit challenges the cornerstone of WhatsApp’s privacy promise: its default end-to-end encryption, which uses the Signal protocol. The plaintiffs allege that, contrary to its in-app claim that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” messages, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” The complaint cites unspecified whistleblowers as the source of this information.
Hellbound and Down 