Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on Thursday that takes direct aim at Meta Platforms and its messaging service WhatsApp, accusing the company of misleading Texans about how private their supposedly secure chats really are. The suit claims WhatsApp’s promises of end-to-end encryption are not what they seem and that Meta employees or contractors can actually view message content. Paxton is asking a state court to stop Meta from accessing users’ chats and to hit the company with penalties under Texas consumer-protection law.
Paxton Files Suit Alleging False Encryption Claims
In a press release from the Texas Attorney General's Office, Paxton said WhatsApp “markets its services as secure and encrypted, but it does not deliver on those promises.” The office said the filing responds to whistleblower accounts and internal materials that, it alleges, show Meta has access to users’ WhatsApp content.
What the petition asks the court to do
The petition, filed in the 71st Judicial District Court in Harrison County, brings claims under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and asks the court for a permanent injunction stopping Meta and WhatsApp from viewing users’ messages without consent. It also seeks civil penalties of $10,000 for each alleged violation and broad discovery into how WhatsApp stores and grants access to message data, per the petition.
The Commerce memo Paxton cites
Paxton’s filing leans on a memo from a Commerce Department investigator that, according to Bloomberg, concluded Meta “stores and can view WhatsApp messages” and warned there was “no limit to the type of WhatsApp message that can be viewed by Meta.” Bloomberg reported the internal probe was later closed and that agency leadership publicly distanced itself from the investigator’s preliminary conclusions.
Meta pushes back
Meta has sharply rejected the accusations. "WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications and any suggestion to the contrary is false," a Meta spokesperson wrote in a statement to Click2Houston, adding that the company plans to fight the suit in court.
Legal stakes for Texans
Under the DTPA, the state can seek injunctive relief, consumer restitution and statutory penalties, and the petition explicitly asks for $10,000 per knowing violation. Legal analysts note that consumer-protection claims typically turn on whether a company’s public representations were misleading to ordinary users, not on proving some intricate mathematical failure of encryption, which makes discovery into internal practices and marketing central to the case, according to National Law Review.
What to watch next
The case will move forward in Harrison County and is expected to trigger bruising discovery fights over whistleblower testimony and internal Meta systems. Paxton has a history of aggressive privacy enforcement, including a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta in 2024, and his office has already signaled parallel probes into Meta’s smart glasses, so the legal battle could stretch well beyond this single suit, per the Texas Attorney General's Office.
