On Twitter, American billionaire and current owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, criticized WhatsApp, stating that the app is untrustworthy.
In response to a tweet from Fouad Dabiri, a Twitter engineer who claimed that WhatsApp was using his phone’s microphone while he slept, Musk tweeted.
The engineer from “Twitter” tweeted a screenshot from his Android phone’s settings which showed that “WhatsApp” was using the microphone at various times. The engineer mentioned that this was part of a longer timeline and asked about the app’s behavior.
In another tweet, Musk mentioned that the founders of WhatsApp left the company following its acquisition by Meta (previously known as Facebook). They were protesting against the changes that occurred after the acquisition and even launched a campaign urging users to remove Facebook from their devices. Additionally, the founders played a role in developing a safer alternative to WhatsApp called Signal.
WhatsApp cannot be trusted https://t.co/3gdNxZOLLy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2023
The engineer and owner of “Twitter” published tweets that many websites and newspapers reported on and shared widely.
The company “WhatsApp” issued an official response on their Twitter account, stating that they had addressed a problem with the “WhatsApp” application on a Pixel phone owned by a Twitter engineer.
According to the company, there seems to be a mistake in the Android operating system that is causing inaccurate privacy information to be displayed. They have reached out to Google to investigate and fix the issue.
Over the last 24 hours we’ve been in touch with a Twitter engineer who posted an issue with his Pixel phone and WhatsApp.
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) May 9, 2023
We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate. https://t.co/MnBi3qE6Gp
The company stated that it did not listen to users without their permission. Users can manage the microphone settings on their phones and WhatsApp only uses the microphone when the user initiates a call or records a message. These communications are protected by end-to-end encryption, so even WhatsApp cannot access them.
Other users also reported experiencing the same issue with their devices, as seen in the comments on the tweets mentioned earlier.
Google has not responded or given any statement regarding this issue yet. However, the argument presented by WhatsApp seems to hold more weight as the app has a feature of complete encryption and the user can control microphone access on both Android and iPhone systems. It is also very challenging for the app to access the microphone without alerting or obtaining permission from the user.
