The claim that Meta-owned WhatsApp activated the device’s mic by itself, allowing it to listen to whatever might be happening, went viral after Foad Dabiri tweet that this was occurring while he slept. Twitter CEO Elon stated in the discussion “WhatsApp can not be trusted.”
Dabiri tweeted an image showing it happening every two minutes between 4:20 and 6:53 in the morning.
WhatsApp responded by claiming that the problem was caused by a “bug” on Android.
In the past 24 hours, we have been in contact with a Twitter Engineer who had posted a problem with his Pixel Phone and WhatsApp.
We think this is a bug in Android which misattributes the information on their Privacy Dashboard. We have asked Google for an investigation and to rectify.
WhatsApp will only listen to communications that are encrypted end-to-end.
One Twitter user’s response:
Would you sue Elon Musk for defamation if that 100% is true?
Dabiri is not the only person who has complained about this problem over the last month.
Some Twitter users have reported that they deleted WhatsApp after seeing the microphone activated in the background. [….]
Reddit is another place where users have noticed that WhatsApp has activated the microphone.
A post 10 days ago described a situation similar to that shared by Dabiri.
The green dot is on all day. The Reddit user wrote: “When I click on, it says WhatsApp is accessing the microphone every 3-4 minute.”
Anyone else experiencing this problem? “The only solution I found was to turn off the permissions in WhatsApp settings. But it’s not practical for someone who makes a lot WhatsApp calls.”
Musk acknowledged that many Americans did not know that Meta/Facebook owned WhatsApp.
Musk said that “WhatsApp’s founders were disgusted by Meta/Facebook, and started the #deletefacebook campaigns. They also made significant contributions to Signal.” “What they discovered about Facebook & its changes to WhatsApp clearly disturbed them.”
Musk also raised concerns about what Twitter was doing before he became CEO, indicating that the government had accessed DMs.
It’s pretty crazy. WhatsApp is used by about two billion people around the globe, so it’s not a small problem. It’s understandable that the possibility of such a thing being compromised is extremely alarming. It’s easy to believe things could be compromised, given what we have seen in the past about efforts to control narratives on social media. It’s important to remember that social media are not completely free of such issues. You can tell that you’re being tracked based on what you see in the ads displayed on your computer. We should also do everything we can to prevent the government from having access to private conversations.
