A former Google engineer and the current Director of Engineering at Twitter leading Growth organization recently encountered a potential privacy issue with WhatsApp on his Pixel 7 Pro. According to Google’s privacy dashboard feature, the app had used his microphone at least nine times overnight, all without interaction from the user.

Foad Dabiri tweeted about the issue over the weekend, posting a screenshot that showed WhatsApp accessing his microphone intermittently in the early morning hours. Considering WhatsApp parent company Meta’s history with privacy issues, the problem understandably drew the ire of many internet commenters.

The twitterverse was quick to gather its pitchforks, and this included eccentric billionaire Elon Musk. Twitter's CEO didn't mince words when expressing his opinions on Meta's privacy practices, even going so far as to say WhatsApp flat-out cannot be trusted.

When another user tweeted that it was surprising how many people don't realize WhatsApp is owned by Meta, Musk elaborated that "WhatsApp founders left Meta/Facebook in disgust, started #deletefacebook campaign & made major contributions to building Signal." He then cast doubt on Meta's direction for the chat app since taking over its development, adding "What [the founders of WhatsApp] learned about Facebook & changes to WhatsApp obviously disturbed them greatly."

While Musk and other commenters alluded to long-standing conspiracy theories that Facebook spies on its users, WhatsApp itself pointed to a flaw in Google's privacy dashboard software as the likely culprit behind Dabiri's issue. The company believes that the log entries showing WhatsApp accessing the microphone are misattributed and has contacted Google to help it get to the bottom of things.

As we've explained before, it's highly unlikely that Facebook is spying on you using your phone's microphone. Suspicious situations like talking to a friend about a product, then seeing an ad for that product online, are much more likely to be a result of sophisticated ad trackers than of genuine spying. So we're inclined to believe WhatsApp's explanation here, but we will be monitoring this story for any further developments.