Telegram CEO: ‘It takes a lot of brain to believe that WhatsApp is safe’

“Only a brainless person believes WhatsApp will still be safe in 2026. When analyzing how WhatsApp implemented encryption, we discovered many vulnerabilities that could be attacked,” Pavel Durov wrote on X on January 26.

His comments came after Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, was caught up in a class action lawsuit. A group of plaintiffs from many countries such as Australia, Brazil, and India filed a lawsuit in US federal court last week, accusing Meta of making false statements about the privacy of the WhatsApp messaging service.

The lawsuit challenges the core of WhatsApp’s security commitment: its default end-to-end encryption, which uses the Signal protocol. The plaintiff alleges that, contrary to the app’s assertion that “only the person in this conversation can read, listen to, or share messages,” Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyze, and can access nearly all of a user’s deemed ‘private’ communications.” The complaint said the information came from internal whistleblowers but did not identify them.

“Any claim that WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is completely false and absurd,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, denied the allegations, calling the lawsuit a “baseless work of fiction.”

Durov has long criticized WhatsApp as a “surveillance tool”, advising users to stay away, especially after the app was acquired by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2014. In 2022, he warned that security vulnerabilities discovered “regularly” in WhatsApp were not incidents but were more likely “backdoors”.

After Durov, Elon Musk also spoke up about WhatsApp’s security issue on January 27: “WhatsApp is not safe, even the Signal protocol is suspicious. Please use X Chat.”

Durov himself has faced major legal challenges in Europe when French officials accused Telegram’s censorship policies of creating conditions for criminal activity to develop. In September 2024, he announced an update to Telegram’s privacy policy, stating that the IP addresses and phone numbers of users who violate the rules can be provided to authorities upon valid legal requests.

Russian officials have repeatedly criticized both WhatsApp and Telegram for “double standards” in complying with data requests. Some Russian lawmakers even described WhatsApp’s operations in the country as a “legalized violation of national security.”