The privacy row surrounding Meta's WhatsApp has triggered sharp reactions across the tech industry, with rival company executives seizing on the lawsuit to question the social media giant's handling of user data.
As allegations surface that WhatsApp messages may not be as private as claimed, high-profile figures such as Elon Musk and Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu have publicly targeted Meta in a series of X (formerly Twitter) posts.
“WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable,” said billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday, urging netizens to use X chat instead. Musk acquired X in 2022, taking ownership of the platform and its messaging feature.
These remarks come after an international group of plaintiffs sued Meta Platforms, accusing the company of making false claims about the privacy and security of its WhatsApp chat service.
Vembu reacts to Meta lawsuit
Meanwhile, Zoho's co-founder and former CEO Sridhar Vembu also reacted to the lawsuit, stating, “As a general principle, when you rely on ads based on user habits, privacy can never be the first priority.”
He described this approach as a real and serious “conflict of interest”, meaning that such model makes it difficult for platforms to genuinely put user privacy first, as their core business depends on tracking user behaviour.
“Combine that with public market pressure for ever greater profit to justify astronomical valuations
(“wealth creation” is the polite term for it), it is naive to assume that these companies will put user privacy first,” he said on X, in response to another tweet which posted the details of the lawsuit filed in the United States against Meta.
What does the lawsuit allege?
In the lawsuit filed on Friday in US District Court in San Francisco, the group of plaintiffs alleged that Meta’s privacy claims are false, adding that WhatsApp can “store, analyze, and access virtually all of WhatsApp users” personal conversations, according to a Bloomberg report.
In response to the accusations, a spokesperson for Meta told the agency that the lawsuit is “frivolous”, along with announcing that the company “will pursue sanctions against plaintiffs’ counsel.”
Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, has made “end-to-end” encryption a central part of WhatsApp’s feature set, offering a kind of encryption that means a text is only accessible to the sender and recipient, but not the company.
According to WhatsApp, its encrypted chats are enabled by default, with an in-app message stating that “only people in this chat can read, listen to, or share” the messages exchanged between two or more people.