India to probe WhatsApp 'phone snooping', calls it unacceptable violation of privacy

The Indian government on Wednesday stated that it will investigate the charges pressed against Whatsapp of allegedly getting access to the microphones of the devices used by the users without their prior consent.

A few days back, a Twitter engineer had accused WhatsApp of accessing his microphone in the background when he was sleeping.

Reacting to the incident, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar tweeted that an investigation into the case will be carried out by the government to find out if WhatsApp was actually accessing the smartphone's microphone while the phone was not in use.

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"This is an unacceptable breach n violation of #Privacy We will be examining this immdtly and will act on any violation of privacy even as new Digital Personal Data protection bill #DPDP is being readied. @GoI_MeitY @_DigitalIndia," Chandrasekhar tweeted.

Chandrasekhar's tweet came after the engineer shared a post which raised questions over the data privacy of Whatsapp users.

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"WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6 AM. What's going on?," tweeted Foad Dabiri, who works as an engineering director at Twitter.

Dabiri, in his tweet, shared screenshots of his phone which showed WhatsApp accessing and using the microphone of the device multiple times.The tweet went viral and received more than 71.5 million views.

WhatsApp's response to allegations

Responding to the allegations, WhatsApp said that itsofficials got in touch with the Twitter engineer.

The company claimed that the problem is likely to have occurred because of a bug in the Android.

"We believe this is a bug on Android that misattributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate," said WhatsApp in a tweet.

The company further claimed that the users have been given full control over their mic settings in the application.

"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," it stated.

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Trust nothing, not even nothing: Musk

Twitter CEO Elon Musk also responded to Dabiri's viral tweet and slammed WhatsApp for a privacy breach.

"Trust nothing, not even nothing," tweeted Musk on the screenshot shared by Dabiri.

"WhatsApp cannot be trusted," he later tweeted.

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