The Telegram founder has mocked those who think Meta can’t read your messages
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Pavel
Durov, the Russian tech entrepreneur who created the Telegram messenger
app, has claimed there is no doubt WhatsApp lacks
any meaningful privacy, after its parent company was hit with a new
lawsuit.
In a major class-action lawsuit filed against Meta
Platforms, Inc. in a US district court last week, an international group
of plaintiffs from countries including Australia, Brazil and
India has accused the company of making false claims about the privacy
of its WhatsApp service.
“You’d have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026,” Durov posted on X on Monday, mocking suggestions that Meta cannot read users’ messages. “When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its ‘encryption’, we found multiple attack vectors.”
The
lawsuit challenges the cornerstone of WhatsApp’s privacy promise: its
default end-to-end encryption, which uses the Signal protocol. The
plaintiffs allege that, contrary to its in-app claim that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” messages, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” The complaint cites unspecified whistleblowers as the source of this information.
A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, categorically denied the allegations. “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Stone said in a statement, calling the lawsuit “a frivolous work of fiction.”
Durov has long criticized WhatsApp as a “tool of surveillance,”
recommending users avoid it entirely, especially following the app’s
2014 takeover by Meta (then Facebook). In 2022, he warned that WhatsApp
vulnerabilities discovered “regularly” were not accidents but likely “backdoors.”
For
his part, Durov has faced major legal challenges in the EU, after
French authorities claimed that Telegram’s moderation policies had
allowed criminal activity to flourish. In September 2024, he announced
an update to Telegram’s Privacy Policy, stating that IP addresses and
phone numbers of users who violate the platform’s rules “can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.”