A few weeks ago the news broke: WhatsApp had been caught using the microphone to eavesdrop. Not on a device, this happened in a lot of Android phones. The networks caught fire revealing their rejection of the acts of WhatsApp. The company was quick to comment that it was an error, not their own, but from Google with Android. Today it seems that things are “cleared” thanks to the big G. We tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about this story!
Has WhatsApp been using the microphone to spy on you?
On May 6, 2023, the user @foaddabiri on Twitter revealed the privacy panel of his Android device through a screenshot. This panel shows the uses of microphones, screen recordings, access to storage, and different options for the most important permissions.
In said capture appeared uses of the microphone by WhatsApp. The curious thing is that these uses were at dawn when the user claimed to be sleeping and not have the device active. That is, according to the capture, WhatsApp was connecting to the microphone every few minutes during the night.
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Three days later, on May 9, 2023, WhatsApp replied to the tweet stating that they were trying to identify the problem and that they believed it to be a mistake on the part of Google and Android. They even publicly asked Google to fix it.
Today June 21the Android Developers account confirm that it was a mistake of Android and that is already solved. So that the privacy panel does not show these connections, you must update WhatsApp and the error will no longer be displayed.
An “error” that has given a lot of itself
During the month and a half that Google, together with WhatsApp, has taken to solve the problem, hundreds of users have been reporting captures and confirming the problem. In social networks, an attempt was made to boycott the WhatsApp app with massive changes to Telegram and similar messaging applications.
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Now everything seems solved, although many users remain suspicious about the matter and do not trust the word of Google y WhatsApp. What do you think? Was it a mistake or has WhatsApp been caught spying on users?
