Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu, creator of WhatsApp rival Arattai, takes aim at Meta’s privacy promises

Zoho founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu said advertising-driven business models make it unrealistic to expect big tech companies to prioritise user privacy, following a lawsuit that challenges Meta Platforms’s claims around WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption.

“As a general principle, when you rely on ads based on user habits, privacy can never be the first priority,” Vembu wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter). 

“The conflict of interest is real and serious.” He added that public market pressure for ever-greater profits makes it “naive to assume that these companies will put user privacy first.”

His comments come after an international group of plaintiffs sued Meta in US District Court in San Francisco, alleging the company made false claims about the privacy and security of WhatsApp, Bloomberg reported.

Vembu last year announced Arattai, a WhatsApp rival messaging app developed by Zoho. Arattai, which means “banter” in Tamil, had a soft launch in 2021 but has so far seen limited adoption.

According to the Bloomberg report, the lawsuit argues that despite WhatsApp promoting end-to-end encryption, which is supposed to ensure that only senders and recipients can access messages, Meta and WhatsApp “store, analyse, and can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications.” The plaintiffs accuse Meta of defrauding WhatsApp’s billions of users worldwide.

Bloomberg reported that Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, called the case “frivolous” and said the company would seek sanctions against the plaintiffs’ counsel. “Any claim that people’s WhatsApp messages are not encrypted is categorically false and absurd,” Stone said in an emailed statement cited by Bloomberg, adding that WhatsApp has used end-to-end encryption based on the Signal protocol for a decade.

Bloomberg also reported that the plaintiffs come from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa, and allege that Meta stores the substance of users’ communications and allows employee access. The complaint cites unnamed whistleblowers, though it does not identify them, Bloomberg said. Lawyers for the plaintiffs are seeking class-action status.