WhatsApp over the past few weeks has offered many interesting features and functions such as allowing the same WhatsApp account to be used on four different phones, having a privacy check or recently WhatsApp Web which now supports message editing features.
Recently some users claim that WhatsApp has accessed the device's microphone without permission. Through the Android 13 privacy dashboard WhatsApp is listed as accessing the microphone every few minutes to every half an hour.
According to WhatsApp the same thing happened to a Twitter engineer's Pixel device. After checking WhatsApp claims that this issue is a bug on Android itself and not from them. It is also emphasized that the microphone settings are under the user's full control.
The device's microphone will also only be accessed by WhatsApp if the user makes a voice call, video call, video recording, take a picture and or voice message. Then every message and communication method in WhatsApp is fully encrypted end-to-end.
The issue on these Android devices is said to be that the privacy dashboard may be incorrectly distributing information about access permissions.