Microphone running in the background? WhatsApp says it’s ‘a bug that mis-attributes information’
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Website WABetaInfo recommended restarting the device to resolve the issue.
PHOTO: AFP
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, United States – 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 tweet on Wednesday.
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?” Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri said in a May 6 post.
The tweet was also reposted by Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday, 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, Mr Musk responded claiming that WhatsApp founders have left the company “in disgust” and started a #deleteFacebook campaign. Facebook Inc acquired WhatsApp back in 2014.
In a follow-up tweet WhatsApp said: “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.”
Previously, website WABetaInfo, which reports on WhatsApp beta news, responded to the microphone issue in a tweet to a different user in April calling it a false positive due to a bug. It recommended restarting the device to resolve the issue.
It also noted that the issue was not new as it had been reported by other users in 2020. Then, WABetaInfo posted on Twitter saying that it also happened to other apps such as Telegram. THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
