Billionaire Elon Musk slammed Meta’s WhatsApp Messenger on Tuesday, saying the messenger “cannot be trusted.”
The Twitter chief was responding to a Saturday tweet from the social media company’s director of engineering Foad Dabiri.
“WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6 a.m. (and that’s just a part of the timeline!) What’s going on?” Dabiri tweeted, later noting for one user that he has a Google Pixel 7 Pro.
Musk initially replied that it was “weird,” but retweeted the post two days later.
“WhatsApp cannot be trusted,” he said in a quote tweet.
WhatsApp did not respond to Musk directly, but did reply to Dabiri on Twitter. Meta pointed FOX Business to a series of tweets.
“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,” it said.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“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,” WhatsApp added.
Meta also pointed to a tweet from WABetaInfo, an account that provides news and real-time updates about WhatsApp.
WABetaInfo said it had previously reported that “this is a false positive from the OS, and some users told it happened after a certain patch – some other apps may experience the same issue.”
