Confide, an encrypted chat app that has reportedly been used by White House staffers, is the subject of a proposed class action lawsuit filed Thursday claims that the service might not be as secure as it claims.

Founded in 2013, Confide offers a confidential messaging app that promises military-grade end-to-end encryption, ephemeral messages and screenshot protection, but Confide user Jeremy Auman claims that the app does not fulfill all of these promises.

In a filing for a new class action lawsuit in New York,  Auman accuses Confide of pushing users to pay $6.99 per month for a premium subscription for heightened security and privacy, but he says that the company failed to “deliver the promised upgraded security features.”

“Contrary to Confide’s representations, the App fails to protect communications its users send through it, and it fails to offer the unequivocal confidentiality advertised by Confide,” Auman’s complaint says. “Specifically, Confide fails to deliver on two of the three requirements that it espouses as necessary for confidential communications: ephemerality and screenshot protection. Absent these protections, Confide knows that it cannot deliver on its promise to consumers that communications sent through it will be confidential.”

According to the filing, Confide’s screenshot protection feature does not work on the Windows version of its app, which would mean that that users could capture an image of any message they receive. Auman says that these screenshots can show both a user’s name and their full message in the same image, despite Confide’s “sliver” feature, which is not supposed to display both names and messages at the same time. He also claims that users are not alerted if someone does manage to screenshot a message.

“Consumers who erroneously thought they were using a secure platform to send confidential and potentially compromising information are now at great risk of having that information used against them,” the filing says.

Confide co-founder and President Jon Brod firmly denied the claims made in the lawsuit. “We have now received the complaint and had an opportunity to review it,” he said in a statement. “Not surprisingly, the accusations set forth in the complaint are unfounded and without merit. We look forward to responding to this frivolous complaint and seeing this case swiftly thrown out of court.”

Image: Confide