WhatsApp likes to present itself as a messenger that puts privacy first. But in the past, the app has come under criticism several times for handling user data.
For a few weeks, users on social media have been complaining that WhatsApp is accessing smartphone microphones in the background. The problem appears to only occur on Android smartphones. Now the company has responded and assured that there was an error and that WhatsApp was not eavesdropping on users.
WhatsApp accesses the microphone in the background
Reports of microphone use by WhatsApp on Android devices have been piling up for several weeks. In early May, Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri also noticed that the app kept accessing the microphone at night, apparently without his doing. In a tweet, Dabiri shows the history of access.
This information comes from the Privacy Dashboard of the Android operating system. If an app is authorized to access certain features like microphone, camera or storage, the dashboard can track exactly when the accesses occur. Other users is the microphone usage based on the Privacy Indicators in Android noticed. The indicators appear in the form of a small dot at the top of the screen. An orange indicator means an app is currently using the microphone.
Is WhatsApp eavesdropping on its users or is there a bug?
Dabiri’s tweet has now reached more than 70 million users. The topic is so present that even Twitter CEO Elon Musk has picked it up. The multi-billionaire wrote in an on Tuesday short answer: “WhatsApp cannot be trusted”.
Now WhatsApp has responded, blaming a bug in Android’s privacy dashboard for microphone use. The company has already asked Google to investigate and fix the error. In another post on Twitter, WhatsApp also emphasizes that “users have full control over their microphone settings”. The messenger only uses the microphone “when a user makes a call or records a voice message or video”. In addition, the recordings are end-to-end encrypted and therefore not visible to WhatsApp. It has been shown several times that in the past this does not always protect users from the parent company Meta being able to read – or hear – the news.
WhatsApp also gets support from well-known insider WABetaInfo, who also states that the problem lies with Android. According to this, the operating system would recognize access to the microphone although there was no access – i.e. a “false positive”. The problem is said to have occurred after a patch and could also occur in other apps.