WhatsApp’s alleged access to phone’s mic: Indian IT minister warns against invasion of privacy

New Delhi: Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Wednesday warned WhatsApp about the alleged breach of personal data privacy of users. The minister of State for Electronics and IT was reacting to an allegation made by Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri.

He suggested that WhatsApp has been using the phone's microphone in the background. "WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep, and since I woke up at 6 AM (and that's just a part of the timeline!) What's going on?" he wrote. He also shared an image that looks like a screenshot taken on his phone. It showed WhatsApp's microphone usage and it was active for five minutes at 6.43 AM, 23 minutes at 625 AM, 2 minutes at 5.59 AM, and 14 minutes at 4.41 AM. The mic was also active at 4.39 AM and 4.22 AM for unspecified durations.

Chandrasekhar called it an "unacceptable breach and violation of privacy". He tweeted: "We will be examining this immediately and will act on any violation of privacy even as the new Digital Personal Data protection bill #DPDP is being readied." The Indian government is working on the inclusive Digital India Act.

Late on Tuesday, the Meta-owned messenger service also responded to the Twitter engineer's claim and said that the mic's activity is being shown by a bug on Android that "mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard". WhatsApp also asked Google to "investigate and remediate".

"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," said WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has close to 500 million users in India.