A former Google engineer and Twitter Growth Director of Engineering discovered a WhatsApp privacy issue on his Pixel 7 Pro. Google’s privacy dashboard showed that the app accessed his phone’s microphone nine times without user engagement.
Engineer Foad Dabiri tweeted his weekend experience. He shared a screenshot showing WhatsApp’s early morning microphone access.
Internet users were naturally outraged given Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company,’s privacy record.
Elon Musk joined the Twitter army quickly. Twitter’s CEO said WhatsApp is untrustworthy and criticised Meta’s privacy practises.
Musk responded to a user’s tweet on the lack of knowledge of Meta’s ownership of WhatsApp. He started the #deletefacebook campaign and helped establish Signal, an alternative messaging network.
Musk also expressed worries about Meta’s WhatsApp strategy since taking over, noting that the founders’ Facebook insights and WhatsApp modifications had profoundly troubled them. Musk and others alluded at Facebook surveillance conspiracy theories.
WhatsApp blamed a possible weakness in Google’s privacy dashboard software for Dabiri’s issue. WhatsApp has asked Google for help determining the truth behind the microphone access log entries.
