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.
A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, categorically denied the allegations. “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Stone said in a statement, calling the lawsuit “a frivolous work of fiction.”
Durov has long criticized WhatsApp as a “tool of surveillance,” recommending users avoid it entirely, especially following the app’s 2014 takeover by Meta (then Facebook). In 2022, he warned that WhatsApp vulnerabilities discovered “regularly” were not accidents but likely “backdoors.”
For his part, Durov has faced major legal challenges in the EU, after French authorities claimed that Telegram’s moderation policies had allowed criminal activity to flourish. In September 2024, he announced an update to Telegram’s Privacy Policy, stating that IP addresses and phone numbers of users who violate the platform’s rules “can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.”
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All messenger apps are ‘transparent’ to spy agencies – Kremlin
Last year, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that all messaging apps are “absolutely transparent systems” to intelligence and security services. Russian officials have repeatedly criticized both WhatsApp and Telegram for what they call double standards in complying with data requests, and some lawmakers have labeled WhatsApp’s operation in the country a “legalized breach of national security.”
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