WhatsApp Caught Using Microphone During the Night

One (admittedly far fetched) theory: Device compromised by advanced existing spyware

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101029

Twitter engineer posts screenshot of his WhatsApp microphone usage. The fingerpointing begins as neither Google nor Facebook want to claim ownership of the problem. Surprise.

My guess: Whatever audio library they are using 'accesses the microphone' whenever checking capabilities of the phone (ie. Does the phone have a mic at all, and therefore should all the voice calling and voice messaging features be enabled).

WhatsApp's official statement regarding this can be found here: https://twitter.com/WhatsApp/status/1655989766431862785

"We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate."

I wonder if an app can spoof the ID they use and pretend to be WhatsApp.

I guess the Twitterer can test by disabling mic permissions for WhatsApp and check later if it's still "using" the microphone.

At any rate, doesn't this still mean that some application is using their microphone in this suspicious manner?