Pavel Durov, Telegram founder, slammed WhatsApp's privacy claims as "the biggest consumer fraud in history," alleging the Meta-owned app secretly reads and shares user messages with third parties despite repeated end-to-end encryption promises.

A January 2026 class-action lawsuit against Meta cites whistleblowers claiming employees and contractors, including Accenture, access WhatsApp chats via an alleged backdoor for monitoring policy violations and more-without user consent.

The suit accuses Meta of circumventing its own encryption protocol, storing and viewing private communications that billions of users believed were secure between sender and recipient only.

Meta has strongly denied the allegations, calling them "categorically false" and affirming that WhatsApp uses the audited Signal Protocol for true end-to-end encryption by default.

Durov contrasted this by positioning Telegram as a platform that "has never" compromised user data and "never will," intensifying the rivalry between the messaging giants over privacy.