If there is an application par excellence to chat, it is WhatsApp. And this leads to consequences such as people interested in spying on what we write. motu owner, through applications or even using alleged errors in the application itself or even in the operating system. If you have If you suspect that WhatsApp is accessing your microphone or camera without your knowledge, here are two tips to check it..
Watch the orange or green dot
The first tip will help you find out if WhatsApp (or any other app) is accessing the microphone or camera at a certain time when you didn’t ask for it. Every time you use your Android phone’s microphonean orange dot appears in the upper right part of the screen and when you activate the camera, the dot is green.
So when for example you make a WhatsApp audio, you should see the green dot. And if you are making a video call (a camera and microphone are needed for this task), the dot will be green. If you don’t make audios, photos or videos but you see these dots, suspect.
View app camera or microphone access history
The previous trick is used to know the accesses to the camera or the microphone in real time, but it is not valid if what we want is to know how many times have you used these items in the last hours and at what time.
To find out, go to ‘settings‘ > ‘security and privacy‘ > ‘privacy‘ > ‘See all permissions‘. Once inside, go to the “Applications” tab and locate WhatsApp.
Now look at all the times WhatsApp used the microphone or the camera and ask yourself if it was you or not. In the latter case, consider the option of withdraw your access (in the Privacy page, in the Permissions Manager), report what happened and even uninstall the app.
And it is that spying on whatsapp is not only unethical but also illegal, in accordance with Article 197.1 of the Penal Code, being punished by imprisonment and economic sanctions. As for the app itself, the company explains that “users have full control over microphone settings. WhatsApp only accesses the microphone when a user makes a call or records a voice memo or video, and even then those communications are protected with end-to-end encryption so WhatsApp can’t listen to them..”
Coverage | Android updates
In Xataka Android | Why Spying on WhatsApp is a Bad Idea: The Legal Consequences Explained by a Lawyer
