Popular messaging app WhatsApp has been accused of “listening in on people” after a Twitter engineer posted a picture that appeared to show the app was listening to him and active even though he was not using it.
On Sunday, Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri posted a screenshot of his microphone usage from his Google Pixel phone on the micro-blogging platform that showed what looked like WhatsApp listening in on him.
"WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6am (and that's just a part of the timeline!) What's going on?," he wrote on Twitter.
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His post garnered a lot of attention, including a claim from Elon Musk that WhatsApp could not be “trusted”.
In a post on Twitter, where the CEO of the micro-blogging platform retweeted Dabiri’s picture, Musk wrote: “WhatsApp cannot be trusted” after initially commenting: “That’s weird” on Sunday.
However, despite Musk’s post, the issue does not appear to be a case of spying.
WhatsApp has said that the problem is with a “bug on Android” adding that users of the messaging service, owned by Facebook parent company Meta, have “full control over their mic settings.”
"We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate," WhatsApp wrote in a statement on Twitter.
"Users have full control over their mic settings.”
The messaging service continued, explaining that the microphone is only accessed when the user is “making a call or recording a voice note or video”.
The statement continued: “Once granted permission, WhatsApp only accesses the mic when a user is making a call or recording a voice note or video - and even then, these communications are protected by end-to-end encryption so WhatsApp cannot hear them."
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