Texas slams Meta and WhatsApp with landmark lawsuit over false encryption and privacy claims

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a high-profile data privacy lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. and its subsidiary WhatsApp LLC, accusing the tech giants of orchestrating a massive fraud by systematically misleading millions of citizens about the confidentiality of their personal communications.

The state's petition, filed in Harrison County District Court, alleges that despite a decade of marketing centered on absolute "end-to-end encryption," Meta maintains hidden internal mechanisms that grant employees and external contractors virtually unrestricted access to private user data.

The fraud of untouchable encryption

The state’s legal challenge strikes directly at WhatsApp's core brand identity. Since implementing mandatory encryption warnings at the top of every chat window in 2016, Meta has assured its 3.3 billion global users that "not even WhatsApp" can view message contents, photos, or voice recordings.

According to the lawsuit, those pervasive marketing representations are blatantly inaccurate and violate the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA). The state’s complaint reveals that Meta has long operated a highly sophisticated, "tiered permissions system" internally designated for content tasks. This infrastructure allegedly allows corporate employees and an expansive network of third-party contractors, including a significant volume of overseas workers based in India, to pull, view, and store unencrypted message content after it has been transmitted.

The state argues that this backend management system effectively nullifies the public-facing security promises made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during sworn testimony before the United States Senate.

Whistleblowers and federal inquiries expose systems

The legal push leans heavily on internal whistleblower accounts and an explosive, recently shuttered federal investigation. The petition explicitly cites a preliminary probe conducted by an enforcement agent within the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security. In an internal communication circulated to other federal agencies earlier this year, the investigator explicitly warned that "Meta can and does view and store all text messages, photographs, audio, and video recordings" sent via the platform, concluding there is "no limit" to the user data the company can access.

While federal authorities abruptly halted that specific export-related inquiry, Texas prosecutors used the findings to construct a broader consumer-protection case. The state contends that Meta's systematic data access has allowed the corporation to acquire massive troves of personal property from Texas residents under completely false pretenses.

Multi-billion-dollar precedents and regulatory backlash

Texas is aggressively seeking an immediate permanent injunction to block Meta from accessing any resident's messaging data without explicit, unambiguous consent, alongside civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation. The legal action immediately triggered a ripple effect across the technology sector; Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly weaponized the Texas filing, labeling WhatsApp’s security architecture a "giant fraud" and urging global users to abandon the app.

The lawsuit represents an extension of Attorney General Paxton’s ongoing regulatory offensive against Big Tech’s data-harvesting practices, following a recent privacy lawsuit against Netflix and a data settlement with LG Electronics.

Meta is facing a highly aggressive prosecution team with a proven track record of securing massive financial penalties; in 2024, the state successfully forced Meta into a historic $1.4 billion settlement over illegal biometric facial-recognition collection, followed by a $1.375 billion data-tracking settlement with Google in 2025.

Meta has issued an outright denial of the state's claims, with a corporate spokesperson stating that WhatsApp cannot access encrypted communications, calling any claims to the contrary completely false, and vowing to vigorously fight the state's petition in court.