WhatsApp publicly rebuts Elon Musk, says Meta cannot read user messages

WhatsApp

• WhatsApp: Private chats protected by end-to-end encryption via Signal protocol
• Meta and WhatsApp cannot access or read users' encrypted message content
• WhatsApp clarifies only metadata, not message content, may be shared with Meta

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WhatsApp has issued a public rebuttal to renewed claims suggesting that the platform’s private chats are not fully encrypted and could be accessed by Meta. In an official post on X, WhatsApp said the allegations are false and reiterated that users’ messages are protected by end-to-end encryption.

According to WhatsApp, all personal messages on the platform are encrypted using the open-source Signal protocol, the same encryption standard used by Signal itself. The company stressed that encryption happens directly on users’ devices, with messages encrypted before they leave the sender’s phone.

WhatsApp said only the intended recipient holds the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt messages, meaning neither WhatsApp nor its parent company Meta can read the contents of chats. It added that message encryption keys are not accessible to WhatsApp or Meta in any form.

The clarification comes after  a lawsuit was filed in a US District Court in San Francisco alleging Meta’s claims around WhatsApp’s “end-to-end encryption” are false. The plaintiffs, who include users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, allege that Meta and WhatsApp actually store, analyze, and can access the contents of users’ private communications. The complaint accuses Meta and its leadership of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide and cites unnamed whistleblowers as the source of these claims.

WhatsApp has long maintained that while Meta owns the platform, it does not have visibility into users’ private messages.

End-to-end encryption means messages are scrambled on the sender’s device and can only be unscrambled on the recipient’s device. Even if messages were intercepted in transit or stored on servers, they would remain unreadable without the private decryption keys.

That said, WhatsApp has previously acknowledged that some metadata, such as who a user messaged and when, can still be collected and shared with Meta, depending on region and policy. This distinction between message content and metadata has often fuelled confusion around what WhatsApp can and cannot see.

WhatsApp’s statement is part of an ongoing effort to reassure users as Meta expands AI features across its apps and experiments with ads in products like WhatsApp Status and Channels. The company has repeatedly said that private chats will remain encrypted and will not be used to train AI models or for ad targeting.