WhatsApp raises concerns, users fear they are being eavesdropped
Disturbing messages appearing on people’s phones have led to fears they are being eavesdropped.
The app appears to be trying to access the microphone inside people’s phones when users are asleep, according to the privacy menu within Google’s Android operating system.
But WhatsApp said it believes the issue is a bug within Android and has categorically stated that the app would not access user microphones without their permission. The issue was raised by Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri, who shared a tweet that included a screenshot of an Android page showing when a certain app accesses the microphone. He noted that he showed a number of attempts to do so, even when he had been asleep.
The post was further amplified by Elon Musk, who shared the post on Twitter and claimed that “WhatsApp cannot be trusted”. Musk’s post followed a series of other criticisms of Mark Zuckerberg, mostly for political reasons, and Twitter also competes with WhatsApp with its direct messaging platform.
In another post, Musk pointed to the fact that WhatsApp is “owned by Meta/Facebook” and claimed that WhatsApp’s former owners had left the parent company “in disgust”. “What they learned about Facebook and the changes to WhatsApp obviously worried them a lot,” he claimed.
“Users have full control over their microphone settings,” the company tweeted in response to Dabir’s tweet. “Once permission is granted, WhatsApp only accesses the microphone when a user makes a call or records a voice or video note – and even then, these communications are protected by end-to-end encryption, so WhatsApp cannot listen to them .
