Billions of people around the world have been using WhatsApp over the past decade for chats — official as well as private. However, there have been a slew of recent allegations against the Meta-owned messaging platform that it has been reading users' conversations and sharing them with third parties. Amid the ongoing conversation around WhatsApp's privacy, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk and Telegram CEO Pavel Durov — both with rival messaging platforms — have highlighted that WhatsApp's encryption practices are questionable, even as Meta has hit back against the allegations.
Musk responded on X to a report suggesting that WhatsApp had accessed users' private messages without their permission. He stated, “Can't trust WhatsApp.” Musk then used the opportunity to highlight his own platform, urging people to move their conversations to X Chat, which he described as offering genuine privacy.
Meanwhile, Durov went one step further, calling out that WhatsApp is perpetrating fraud. “WhatsApp's ‘encryption' may be the biggest consumer fraud in history — deceiving billions of users. Despite its claims, it reads users' messages and shares them with third parties,” he wrote on X while posting portions of a report that purportedly shows that Meta employees and third parties, including companies like Accenture, may have “broad access to users' messages” without their consent or knowledge. Durov emphasised that Telegram has never engaged in such practices and never would.
WhatsApp dismissed the allegations as completely false. “The claims in this lawsuit are categorically false and absurd. WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade so your messages cannot be read by anyone other than the sender and recipient,” the company said.
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