Google has discovered a bug in the Android operating system that signaled the use of the WhatsApp microphone and could lead to serious violations of user privacy. Meta’s in-house engineering team asked the company to investigate the issue last month, acknowledging that it was a notification bug in the OS, not that the microphone was actually triggered by the app.

In a series of tweets, both companies exchanged polite messages to resolve the situation. While Meta asks Google to “look into and fix it,” the giant responds by saying it’s fixing the problem. “We thank WhatsApp for their cooperation and we apologize for the confusion this error has caused users.” Given that most of the interactions between the big techies are humorous and playful in tone, the seriousness is noticeable and has clearly caused discomfort between the two of them.

Although the Pixel smartphones received the 13QPR3 update last week, the issue has been resolved with update the application itself – made by the Meta development team. None of them offered patch note indicating that this issue has been resolved, although users have received no new notifications for using this feature on their mobile phones.

Questionable privacy

Even though WhatsApp warned of the issue in May, it took them over a month to get a direct response from the Android development team, raising suspicion if its users’ privacy was compromised in any way during that period. However, Google claims that the problem was in the notifications, and the microphone did not actually work.

After the issue was resolved, Meta did not comment on the issue again and left its campaign for app privacy and security through encryption open, which can be seen on several social networks.

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Source: 9to5 Google

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