A claim that the Meta-owned WhatsApp was activating the device’s microphone by itself (thus enabling it to listen as to what might be going on) went viral when Foad Dabiri tweeted that this was happening while he was asleep and Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded in the discussion that “WhatsApp cannot be trusted.”
WhatsApp cannot be trusted https://t.co/3gdNxZOLLy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2023
Dabiri tweeted a picture showing that it was going on every two minutes when he was asleep between 4:20 a.m. and 6:53 a.m.
WhatsApp then claimed that it was a “bug on Android” in response.
Over the last 24 hours we’ve been in touch with a Twitter engineer who posted an issue with his Pixel phone and WhatsApp.
We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate.
Users have full control over their mic settings 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.
Noted one Twitter user in response:
If that’s 100% true, you should sue @elonmusk for defamation of the brand, would you do that?
However, Dabiri was not the only one to say that they had this problem in the past month or more.
Other Twitter users said they saw WhatsApp had activated the microphone in the background and have since deleted the app. [….]
The issue is also popular on Reddit, where many users notice WhatsApp activates the microphone.
A post from 10 days ago describes a similar situation to what Dabiri shared.
“The green dot in the status bar is turned on nonstop all day. When I click on it says WhatsApp accessing microphone every 3-4 minutes,” the Reddit user posted.
“Anyone else facing this? The only fix I found is turning off permission in WhatsApp settings, but it’s not feasible for someone who takes a lot of WhatsApp calls.”
Musk agreed that many Americans didn’t know that WhatsApp was owned by Meta/Facebook.
Yeah.
Or that WhatsApp founders left Meta/Facebook in disgust, started #deletefacebook campaign & made major contributions to building Signal.
What they learned about Facebook & changes to WhatsApp obviously disturbed them greatly.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2023
Musk declared that the “WhatsApp founders left Meta/Facebook in disgust, started #deletefacebook campaign & made major contributions to building Signal.” He said, “What they learned about Facebook & changes to WhatsApp obviously disturbed them greatly.”
Musk has also raised questions about what Twitter did before he took over, indicating there was government intrusion into DMs.
This is pretty wild. About two billion people use WhatsApp all around the world, so if there’s a problem that’s no small issue. The possibility that such things could be compromised is rightly extremely concerning. Given what we’ve seen about the effort to control the narrative from social media in the past, it’s not hard to believe that things can be compromised. We always should be proceeding with the thought that no social media is completely free from such things. We can see that we’re being tracked by what we view by what ads come up on our computers. But we also should be pushing to do all we can to not have the government or any platform having access to our private conversations.
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