Texas is turning corporate privacy promises into consumer protection lawsuits. The state’s recent privacy-related enforcement actions may indicate an emerging litigation strategy: treating what companies say about consumer privacy, security, and data use as potential consumer-protection representations.
Texas’s most recent petition against Meta alleges that the tech giant’s messaging app WhatsApp can access users’ encrypted messages. Instead of basing the claims on a newly enacted digital privacy law, the state is using its decades-old consumer protection statute, the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, to challenge one of WhatsApp’s defining product promises — that user’s messages are private.
An Emerging Strategy …