Overview
- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit in Harrison County on May 21, 2026 under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act seeking a permanent injunction to block Meta and WhatsApp from accessing Texans’ messages and civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation.
- The complaint cites Bloomberg reporting, a claimed Commerce Department investigator memo, and whistleblower accounts to allege that Meta employees or contractors could retrieve plaintext WhatsApp messages after they were sent.
- Meta has publicly denied the claims and said WhatsApp cannot access encrypted communications, with company spokespeople pledging to fight the suit in court.
- Independent cryptographers and prior technical reviews say there is no public, conclusive cryptographic proof of a systemic backdoor in WhatsApp’s Signal-based encryption and note that some plaintext exposure can result from user-driven workflows such as abuse reports and cloud backups.
- The case fits a pattern of Paxton’s recent privacy enforcement actions and could shape how courts treat privacy marketing claims even without a proven technical break, so the litigation’s evidence gathering will determine whether the dispute turns on marketing language or cryptographic failure.