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User Claims ‘WhatsApp’ Recored Them While Sleeping…Musk Raises Red Flag – Watch

User Claims ‘WhatsApp’ Recored Them While Sleeping…Musk Raises Red Flag – Watch

Foad Dabiri tweeted that “WhatsApp” was recording all by itself while he was asleep and Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded in the discussion that “WhatsApp cannot be trusted.”

The user said that they woke up one morning to find that their phone had been recording them while they were asleep. They said that they had not given WhatsApp permission to record them, and that they were concerned about their privacy.

Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, retweeted the user’s story and said that it was “concerning.” He said that he was “looking into it.”

WhatsApp responded saying: “Over the last 24 hours we’ve been in touch with a Twitter engineer who posted an issue with his Pixel phone and WhatsApp.

We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate.

Users have full control over their mic settings 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.”

More  Twitter users said they saw WhatsApp had activated the microphone in the background and have since deleted the app. […

The issue is also popular on Reddit, where many users notice WhatsApp activates the microphone.

“The green dot in the status bar is turned on nonstop all day. When I click on it says WhatsApp accessing microphone every 3-4 minutes,” the Reddit user posted.

“Anyone else facing this? The only fix I found is turning off permission in WhatsApp settings, but it’s not feasible for someone who takes a lot of WhatsApp calls.”

In 2019, WhatsApp was fined $267 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission for violating the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The company was found to have collected user data without their consent and to have shared that data with Facebook.

Written by Mark Stevens - May 9, 2023