New Delhi: Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Wednesday warned Big Tech like Meta-owned WhatsApp over alleged violations of users’ personal data privacy. Chandrasekhar responded to Phod Dabiri, a Twitter engineer, who posted on Twitter that WhatsApp is using the microphone in the background.
“What’s going on between the time I was asleep and the time I woke up at 6 a.m. (and this is a part of the timeline!)?” He posted on the micro-blogging platform. Chandrasekhar said this was an “unacceptable breach and breach of privacy”. ,Also read: Google I / O 2023: These products will be screened at the event today,
“We will immediately look into it and act on any breach of privacy even as the new Digital Personal Data Protection Bill #DPDP is being drafted,” the minister said. ,Read also: List of 8 countries with 4-day working week,
Meanwhile, WhatsApp responded to the Twitter engineer’s claim late on Tuesday, saying that it believes “this is a bug on Android that mid-attributes notifications in their privacy dashboard” and that “Google is investigating.” and asked to improve”.
“Users have complete control over their mic settings. Once permission is granted, WhatsApp accesses the mic only when a user is on a call or recording a voice note or video – and even then, These communications are protected by end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp cannot listen to them,” the Meta-owned platform said.
The microphone issue came as WhatsApp users in India were left stunned at the volume of international spam calls they have been receiving over the past few days, putting many at risk of financial loss.
These spam calls with international numbers, mostly from African and South East Asian countries, along with fake messages from unknown users, have flooded WhatsApp and Indians have nowhere to go except Twitter.
Meta-owned WhatsApp has close to 500 million users in India. Although the mobile numbers show the country codes of Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Ethiopia, it is not necessary that these calls are actually coming from these countries.
Most of these calls originate from +251 (Ethiopia), +62 (Indonesia), +254 (Kenya), +84 (Vietnam) and other countries. WhatsApp is yet to comment on the increasing number of fake spam calls on its platform.