On January 26, Elon Musk urged online users to use X chat after news broke out about a privacy lawsuit against Meta platforms. An international group of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco U.S District Court against Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms Inc., alleging that the company has access to private WhatsApp messages.The lawsuit claims that the company's privacy statements about "end-to-end encryption" are misleading and that the company and WhatsApp "store, analyze, and have access to virtually so-called private messages." The lawsuit alleges that the company has access to personal content through employees and internal systems. The international group of plaintiffs is from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa, as per public reports.The lawsuit cited that "whistleblowers" have helped bring out information about privacy concerns. However, the lawsuit doesn't reveal the identity of the said whistleblowers. Lawyers for the plaintiff group are asking the court to certify a class-action suit. The lawyers are from multiple law firms, including Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Keller Postman, and Barnett Legal, among others.On January 26, Elon Musk reshared a post related to the lawsuit, urging users to switch to X chat over privacy concerns,"WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use X chat."How has Meta responded to the lawsuit?In an X post on January 26, Meta communications director Andy Stone commented on Bloomberg's post on the lawsuit against the company and said,"Any claim that people's WhatsaApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd. WhatsApp has been using end-to-end encryption based on the Signal protocal for ten years. This lawsuit is a baseless fabrication."The Signal Protocol is a cryptographic protocol for end-to-end encrypted messaging and calls. Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, a rival of WhatsApp, said,"You'd have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its "encryption", we found multiple attack vectors."On January 23, as per Reuters, British regulator Ofcom on Friday claimed that it has opened an investigation into Meta Platforms,"Last year, we carried out a review of the wholesale market for business bulk SMS messages, which are often used for things like appointment reminders and parcel delivery notifications. The available evidence suggests that the information we received in response from Meta may not have been complete and accurate."While responding to Ofcom, a spokesperson for the company said that the technology giant cooperated with regulatory obligations and dedicated "significant resources" to respond to Ofcom's information requests.