WhatsApp said users have full control over the mic settings. — AFP
WhatsApp said a bug on Android is falsely displaying information on a Pixel user’s privacy dashboard to indicate that the app is running the microphone in the background.
“We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate,” the company said in a May 10 tweet.
Pixel is a brand of smartphone developed and made by Google.
The company made the statement in response to a Twitter engineer who tweeted a post with a screenshot showing the microphone usage on his Pixel phone.
“WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6am (and that's just part of the timeline!). What’s going on?” Foad Dabiri said in a May 6 post.
The tweet was also reposted by Twitter CEO Elon Musk on May 10, who said “WhatsApp cannot be trusted”. The post has received more than 54 million views.
After a user said that many people are not aware of how WhatsApp is owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company which changed its name from Facebook Inc to Meta in 2021, Musk responded claiming that WhatsApp founders have left the company ‘in disgust’ and started a #deleteFacebook campaign. Facebook Inc acquired WhatsApp back in 2014.
WhatsApp said users have full control over the 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,” the company added in a follow-up tweet.
Previously, website WABetaInfo responded to the microphone issue in a tweet to a different user last month calling it a ‘false positive due to a bug...’. It recommended restarting the device to resolve the issue.
It also noted that the issue is not new as it has been reported by other users back in 2020. Then, WABetaInfo posted on Twitter saying that it also happens to other apps such as Telegram.
