On January 25, 2026, a global coalition of plaintiffs initiated legal action against Meta Platforms in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco. The lawsuit accuses the tech giant of misleadingly promoting the privacy and security capabilities of WhatsApp. Meta has long touted 'end-to-end' encryption as a fundamental feature of WhatsApp, asserting that this technology guarantees messages remain exclusively accessible to the sender and recipient, with no possibility of interception by the platform itself. However, the plaintiff group contends that Meta systematically stores, analyzes, and enjoys virtually unrestricted access to the private communications of all WhatsApp users, effectively engaging in what amounts to fraud on a global scale by deceiving billions of users worldwide. In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the lawsuit as meritless and announced that the company intends to pursue legal sanctions against the attorneys representing the plaintiffs.