Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Thursday against Meta and its platform WhatsApp over privacy concerns, alleging the social media giant has lied to and deceived the Lone Star State’s residents.
The lawsuit states that WhatsApp markets its service to use end-to-end encryption, which means only the sender and receiver can access the messages. However, insider accounts have reported claims of the Mark Zuckerberg-founded Meta presenting WhatsApp as encrypted to be false according to the suit and a Thursday press release from Paxton’s office.
“WhatsApp markets its services as secure and encrypted, but it does not deliver on those promises. I am suing to protect Texans’ privacy and ensure that WhatsApp by Meta does not mislead Texans by unlawfully accessing private conversations and data,” Paxton said in his press release.
Paxton is bringing these claims under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act for WhatsApp allegedly misleading users by claiming that their conversations are encrypted, the Texas Tribune reported.
“With end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, your personal messages and calls are secured with a lock. Only you and the person you’re talking to can read or listen to them, and no one else, not even WhatsApp,” WhatsApp states on its website.
Texas’ lawsuit calls these claims into question.
“WhatsApp and its parent company, Meta, have access to virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications,” the lawsuit claims.
Texas is requesting that there be an order preventing WhatsApp from accessing the content of Texans’ messages and for civil penalties of $10,000 per violation, according to the lawsuit.
“Texans deserve to know whether their private communications are indeed truly private,” Paxton said in his press release.
“WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications, and any suggestion to the contrary is false. We will fight this suit as we continue defending our strong record on protecting people’s messages,” Margarita Franklin, a WhatsApp spokesperson, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement.
Paxton’s office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for additional comment.
Paxton has sued several companies on behalf of Texas. On May 11, Paxton sued Netflix, accusing it of using users’ data without their consent, the Texas Tribune reported.
Back in 2024, Meta paid Texas $1.4 billion after Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using facial recognition technology without users’ consent, according to a press release from the attorney general’s office at the time. A lawsuit against Google was also settled last year for $1.4 billion that accused Google of collecting users’ data without their consent, according to the Texas Tribune.
Paxton is a notably candidate for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat and received President Donald Trump endorsement on Tuesday, ahead of his May 26 GOP primary runoff election against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
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