A recurring WhatsApp bug somehow gained notoriety in the last days after that. report of a twitter engineer received Elon Musk’s response “You can’t trust WhatsApp”: app appears constantly accessing the microphone even though we are not using it.

Not an isolated case, but others they recently reported similar issues and at least four years ago. The bug finally caught Meta’s attention. in a tweetclaims to be a false positive and asked Google to investigate Problem.

WhatsApp blames Google

Android 12 has released the Privacy Panel, which is a central place for system settings, which is possible to see in summary. which apps have accessed sensitive system permissions? and when. This panel adds to the somewhat longer-standing initiatives, such as notifications that an app is using these permissions or privacy indicators.

It is precisely this Privacy Panel that has sparked excitement after the Twitter engineer. Foad Dabir realized that Show WhatsApp accessing microphone at nightbefore he wakes up. The tweet was effective enough to get a response from his boss, Elon Musk: “WhatsApp cannot be trusted.”

The topic has garnered enough repercussions for it to receive an official response from WhatsApp confirming that the issue is relevant. False positive caused by an Android bug, not WhatsApp. That is, the Android system would be incorrectly attributing this use of the microphone to WhatsApp. Then it will be interesting to know which app is accessing the microphone or if it is an app, as this should not be possible when the mobile is locked.

WhatsApp has contacted the Twitter engineer and Asked Google to investigate and fix. So the solution should be on the way, but we’ll have to see how it arrives: If it’s a system bug, it will depend on security and/or Android updates, and we already know they don’t reach everyone very often.

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