After weeks of investigation, Google has ended up accepting that the WhatsApp spy microphone error on its devices is its responsibility. The Mountain View company has apologized to consumers after this privacy failure that had caused alarm among its users.
In early May, a Twitter engineer using a Pixel 7 Pro discovered that WhatsApp was notifying him that his microphone was on all night. Soon after, several other Pixel users and Android devices noticed the same thing as well, and took to social media to raise their concerns.
At first, WhatsApp pointed to a bug in the Android device and concluded that it was wrongly attributing microphone information in its Privacy Panel. The Meta-owned messaging service contacted Google to fix the controversial issue. Months later Android has accepted that it was a failure of its system.
According to the engineer who discovered it, the bug in question has “produced erroneous privacy indicators and notifications” in the Privacy Panel, a tool found on many Android phones to let users know what kind of data is being used by the installed applications.
From Google they recommend users to stay updated with the latest version of WhatsApp to correct errors and incorporate the latest features into the messaging platform, something that would help counteract the privacy failure.
“We thank WhatsApp for their collaboration and we apologize for the confusion that we may have caused users,” they have stated from Google, which has assumed full responsibility for the case of the spy microphone.
