A Twitter engineer’s screenshot of his device has sparked concern about WhatsApp allegedly accessing devices’ microphones even when the app is not active. Foad Dabiri, the engineer, claimed that his WhatsApp application was constantly using the microphone while he was sleeping.
His concern has also drawn a response from his boss, Elon Musk. “Trust Nothing, Not even nothing”.,” Mr Musk tweeted.
Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called the incident a violation of privacy and promised that the government would look into it right away.
“This is an unacceptable invasion of privacy.” “We will investigate this immediately and will take appropriate action if any violation of privacy occurs, even as the new Digital Personal Data Protection Bill DPDP is being prepared (sic),” the Union Minister of State for Electronics and Technology tweeted.
WhatsApp has denied the claim, saying, “Users have complete control over their mic settings, and Google will investigate and remediate.”
“Once granted permission, WhatsApp only 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 WhatsApp cannot hear them,” the company explained.
However, several users in the comments section have claimed to be experiencing similar issues.
WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging app that employs end-to-end encryption to prevent the content of messages from being read by unauthorised parties.
Furthermore, WhatsApp has previously faced privacy concerns, such as: sharing some user data with its parent company Meta, such as your phone number, device information, location, and contacts.Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called the incident a violation of privacy and promised that the government would look into it right away.
