Khaberni - Elon Musk has reignited his competition with Meta on Thursday by stating that he "cannot trust WhatsApp", the famous messaging app owned by Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg.
The billionaire's statements came in light of a new class-action lawsuit filed against "Meta", alleging that the app intercepted users' private messages despite its claim of providing end-to-end encryption, and even shared them with third parties like the IT consulting firm Accenture.
In response to a post on the "X" platform about the lawsuit, Musk wrote: "cannot trust WhatsApp". In another post, the billionaire urged users to switch to "X Chat" for messaging and voice and video calls, stating it "comes with this wonderful feature of true privacy", according to a report by "Live Minit".
"X Chat" is a messaging and calling service belonging to Musk's owned X platform, with the stand-alone app for this service expected to launch on April 17, 2026.
WhatsApp strongly responded to these allegations in a comment on Musk's post, saying "the claims made in this lawsuit are completely false and ridiculous. WhatsApp has been encrypted end-to-end using the Signal protocol for a decade, so no one can read your messages except the sender and the recipient".
A report by Bloomberg earlier this year mentioned that American law enforcement agencies are investigating claims made by a former contractor with Meta, which stated that the company was able to access WhatsApp messages despite claims of complete encryption between parties.
It was said that the investigation was led by special agents from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The company was also the subject of a similar complaint from a whistleblower, submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024.
According to reports, two individuals working in content moderation at "WhatsApp" last year informed an investigator in the Bureau of Industry and Security, part of the Commerce Department, that some Meta staff were able to access WhatsApp messages.
They mentioned that some employees of the consulting firm "Accenture" had broad privileges to view the content of private messages.
One of the agents wrote: "Both sources together confirmed that employees at their workplace had unrestricted access to WhatsApp".
The "Bloomberg" report indicates that Larkin Fordayce was a contractor with "Accenture", where he worked in content moderation on behalf of "Meta", and claimed that contractors were later granted their own special access privileges on the platform.
However, even before that, he alleged that they were able to request access to communications, and that "the Facebook team was able to extract any content they wanted and send it".
