India, Jan. 25 -- An international group of users has reportedly sued Meta Platforms, Inc., accusing the company of misleading billions of WhatsApp users about the privacy of their messages and falsely claiming that chats are "end-to end" encrypted. However, Meta has denied the allegations, terming the lawsuit baseless.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday in a US District Court in San Francisco, challenges Meta's long-standing assertions that WhatsApp messages are protected by end-to-end encryption and inaccessible to the company itself, according to a Bloomberg report.

End-to-end encryption has been a central pillar of WhatsApp's privacy pitch. Meta has repeatedly said this form of encryption ensures that messages can only be read by the send...