Millions of WhatsApp customers urged to vary a easy setting on their cellphone

‌If you utilize WhatsApp and have it put in on an Android system then you definately may wish to change one quite simple setting. It was lately found that this vastly in style chat service is perhaps affected by a worrying bug that might enable it to entry the microphone on sure units with out the proprietor realizing. To make issues worse, this flaw even works when the app isn’t open or is being actively used.

The problem was first found by Twitter engineer, Foad Dabiri who then posted an image of what he discovered on social media. The picture reveals that his WhatsApp software was lively while he was slumbering and never utilizing his smartphone.

“WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6AM (and that’s just a part of the timeline!) What’s going on?,” Dabiri tweeted.

WhatsApp shortly responded to the message with the Meta-owned platform saying, “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 imagine it is a bug on Android that mis-attributes info of their Privacy Dashboard and have requested Google to research and remediate.”

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It remains unclear exactly who is at fault or how many phones ate affected but anyone worried by the glitch might now want to turn off mic access within WhatsApp.

To switch things off simply follow these steps…

• Open your phone’s ‘Settings’ app

• Scroll down and tap ‘Privacy’

•Open ‘Permission manager’

• Scroll down to ‘Microphone’ and tap it, then look for ‘WhatsApp’

• You should see a new screen which says ‘Microphone access for this app’ with three options: ‘Allow only while using the app’, ‘Ask every time’, and ‘Don’t allow’.

• Select ‘Ask every time’ or ‘Don’t allow’, but bear in mind that clicking ‘Don’t allow’ will prevent you from sending voice notes and making calls.

Foad Dabiri was using a Pixel device when he spotted the glitch and there’s no current word on whether the issue affects only these Google-made devices or other phones powered by Android.

We expect an update to be released soon so watch this space.