Elon Musk says WhatsApp is not secure; Meta executive hits back

Billionaire Elon Musk took to X to slam Meta's WhatsApp after whistleblowers said private chats on the messaging platform can be read by the company, despite promises of end-to-end encryption.

"WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use �� Chat," he wrote on X.



Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta, responded to Musk's post, dismissing the reports as false.

"WhatsApp can’t read messages because the encryption keys are stored on your phone and we don’t have access to them. This is a no-merit, headline-seeking lawsuit brought by the very same firm defending NSO after their spyware attacked journalists and government officials," his post read.


As per a Bloomberg report, an international group of plaintiffs sued Meta Platforms alleging that the company has made false claims about the privacy and security of WhatsApp. Meta has made “end-to-end” encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set, offering a kind of encryption that means a message is only accessible to the sender and recipient, but not the company.

In the lawsuit filed Friday in the US District Court in San Francisco, the group of plaintiffs allege that Meta’s privacy claims are false. They allege that Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications” — and accuse the companies and their leaders of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide.

A spokesperson for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said that the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.”