Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp , doesn’t have the Is WhatsApp best reputation when it comes to Is WhatsApp privacy. While some haven’t forgotten the Cambridge Analytica fiasco , others have been warning for years about the amount of permissions and information the app obtains compared to other messaging services. But this week the social network raised alarm bells after Foad Dabiri, a Twitter engineer , shared a permissions log from his phone that indicated that WhatsApp was using the microphone on his Pixel phone while he was sleeping.
WhatsApp has been using my microphone
In the background, while I was sleeping, and since I woke up at 6am (and that’s just part of the timeline!) What’s going on?” Some media outlets exaggerated the story by including a response from Musk in which he claimed that ‘WhatsApp could not be trusted’, glorifying a casual comment as a warning of the end of days (and proving that we live in the worst timeline in which anything the CEO of Twitter says is news). However, the interesting thing about this whole thread is WhatsApp’s response to the problem:
Over the past we have been in contact
With a Twitter engineer who reported an Estonia WhatsApp Number List issue with their Pixel phone and WhatsApp. We believe this is a bug in Android that is posting misinformation in their privacy dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and fix this.”
WhatsApp will stop working on these phones at the end of the year
WhatsApp then expanded on its response by stating that “ Users have full control over their microphone settings. Once permission is granted, only Estonia WhatsApp Number Database accesses the microphone 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 that cannot listen to them . ” The social network’s response points out that this is an error in the reading of the permissions and uses of applications like .
However, Pixel devices which have special functions
To be able to see when the microphone is being ) seem to indicate that part of Meta’s response is not complete. In fact, many users have that even after denying microphone access to , the application seems to reestablish this access without authorization. Users can Bulk Database check how the permissions are on their cell phone by accessing their device’s settings. Although it depends on the manufacturer, the easiest way is to use the search engine in settings and type ‘permissions’, select any option similar to ‘permission manager’, search for microphone and then check or other applications that you don’t remember or think should have this authorization.
