Elon Musk Slams Meta’s WhatsApp, Claims the Messaging App ‘Cannot Be Trusted’
TED
Twitter owner Elon Musk took on Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg with a single tweet Tuesday: “WhatsApp cannot be trusted.”
Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, acquired the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014; Meta also owns social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Musk’s tweet was in response to Foad Dabiri, Twitter’s director of engineering.
“WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6AM (and that’s just part of the timeline!) What’s going on?” Dabiri claimed in a tweet Tuesday.
On its official Twitter page, WhatsApp addressed the engineers concerns.
“Over the last 24 hours we’ve been in touch with a Twitter engineer who posted an issue with his Pixel phone and WhatsApp.
We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate,” the tweet read.
Zuckerberg testified before Congress in 2018 on the “conspiracy theory” that Facebook listened in to users’ conversations so they could better target advertising. Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) asked Zuckerberg outright:
PETERS: Yes or no: Does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users?
ZUCKERBERG: No.
According to TechCrunch, Zuckerberg “added that his answer meant ‘no’ in terms of the conspiracy theory that keeps getting passed around, but noted that the social network does allow users to record videos, which have an audio component. That was a bit of an unnecessary clarification, though, given that the question was about surreptitious recording, not something users were explicitly recording media to share.”
In a separate tweet responding to ultra-conservative Laura Loomer, Musk inferred that a Zuckerberg-backed conference is with the “far left.”
“I am in Washington D.C. reporting on the secret election summit hosted by CEIR, which is funded by Mark Zuckerberg!” Loomer tweeted.
“Strange that election officials from pivotal regions attended a far left conference when they’re supposed to be impartial,” Musk replied.
Online publishing platform Medium.com published an article by journalist Rebecca Ciesielski called, Is your phone listening to your conversations? The article said it “used reverse engineering techniques to gain more clarity” on the issue.
The findings? “At the moment we — like many others — cannot give a final answer to this question.”
Meta has responded to past “spying” allegations: “Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp do not listen in or use the cell phone microphone to influence advertising in any way.”
