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Comment by worldsavior | Hacker News Reader

This screenshot doesn't make any sense. Android won't allow a background app to access the microphone or camera. If it would, then there is an exploit in Android but I doubt it's a security bug since no one actually noticed it (Android notifies when an app access the microphone).

Also, if Whatsapp did somehow listen in the background , it seems like those are one-time accesses. WhatsApp would not benefit anything if it would listen for a very short time.

It seems like it would be a stupid action from WhatsApp, since they would have to go through the trouble of transcribing voice to text, and it costs power.

If WhatsApp would listen all the time, or for even a minute, the battery consumption would go very high. Doesn't seem feasible.

It seems like a bug in WhatsApp or a bug in Android's privacy dashboard.

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WhatsApp says it's an Android bug, Google says they're investigating. This would be a better url.

https://www.engadget.com/whatsapp-bug-is-making-some-android...

More likely an Android exploit WhatsApp is making use of instead of doing the right thing and reporting it to Google.

If so that will be revealed by the ongoing investigation. I'm going to wait a bit before speculating.

In general I'm skeptical of the value proposition. You can't record too much without tanking the battery life. They already have so much to target advertisements. What does a random snippet that probably doesn't even have any talking add?

> You can't record too much without tanking the battery life.

Is that an Android thing? I use Merlin to listen to birds and I can record for hours and only lose 20-30%.

depending on what you mean by hours that sounds like significant battery drain compared to screen off and asleep?

I mean it’s still recording with the screen off and I’m also using gps for tracking. For hours I mean like 4-5. I don’t think that’s significant at all. You would hardly notice it if you were actually using your phone.

Huh. I see a very significant drop in battery life if I use gps for tracking. My phone would last for days with the screen off, airplane mode, and no apps running in the background. Add tracking and it lasts maybe 10 hours. (I pay attention to this because it's a factor in determining how many battery packs to take backpacking)

>>> can't record too much without tanking the battery life

I disagree, a cellphone's microphone is a passive component don't see why this would affect battery life in a big way.

However when recording a good amount of data is being shuffled through ram, the cpu has to encode the wavestream, if stored the flash memory will have to do it's thing, if transmitted, the radios will have to wake up and run through all the data as well. The microphone does not exist in isolation.

This is not as power intensive as you would think though. If designed well these simple operations could last year's on a single battery cell. Most of cell phone battery use comes from transmitting and screen usage. Passive microphone and storage is nothing

> They already have so much to target advertisements.

Whatsapp should have nothing more than your contacts list.

WhatsApp has video calls. WhatsApp also has a significant user base amount illiterate people. They've built a clever intuitive system where you hold a button down to record a voice message. Obviously it shouldn't be recording without the user asking for it, but there's a reason for it to be an option.

Edit: I realized you might be referring to WhatsApp not having much ad data. True, but their parent company Meta does.

Android will let you give an app permission to use the microphone in the background but this is not the default

It only has "While using the app" permission. I know there are voice recorders but I believe a notification of some sort is needed.

> If WhatsApp would listen all the time, or for even a minute, the battery consumption would go very high. Doesn't seem feasible.

Regardless if it's true or not, should WhatsApp or any other app spy on the user by using the microphone in the background, the "safe" (from their POV) way to do that would be to tap into the audio signal, save it somewhere at low bitrate while removing silent parts, then wait when the user starts an update or any network/cpu intensive job and compress+transmit it in the background. No need to keep the CPU at high load 100% of the time.

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