A New Lawsuit Alleges a Backroom Deal Between Google and Facebook – But the Evidence Is Thin

On Wednesday, the Texas attorney general announced a far-reaching antitrust case against Google’s ad business. The complaint makes a lot of eye-opening allegations, including a long-running conspiracy between Google and Facebook to defuse the threat of header bidding, but one of the strangest allegations had to do with WhatsApp. According to the complaint, Google made a deal with Facebook to access millions of private messages, and photos from WhatsApp users, shortly after the app was acquired.