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Unacceptable breach and violation of privacy: MoS IT warns Big Tech
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IANS | 10 May, 2023
Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar on
Wednesday warned Big Tech like Meta-owned WhatsApp over the alleged
breach of personal data privacy of users.
Chandrasekhar
reacted to a Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri, who posted on Twitter that
WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background.
"While I
was asleep and since I woke up at 6 a.m. (and that's just a part of the
timeline!) What's going on?" he posted on the micro-blogging platform.
Chandrasekhar said that this is an "unacceptable breach and violation of privacy".
"We
will be examining this immediately and will act on any violation of
privacy even as the new Digital Personal Data protection bill #DPDP is
being readied," said the minister, as the country prepares its inclusive
Digital India Act.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp responded to the Twitter
engineer's claim late on Tuesday, saying it believes "this is a bug on
Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard" and
"have asked Google to investigate and remediate".
"Users have
full control over their mic settings. Once granted permission, WhatsApp
only accesses the mic when a user is making a call or recording a voice
note or video - and even then, these communications are protected by
end-to-end encryption so WhatsApp cannot hear them," said the Meta-owned
platform.
The microphone issue came as WhatsApp users in India
have been left baffled at the amount of international spam calls they
have been receiving in the last couple of days, leaving many at the risk
of financial loss.
These spam calls with international numbers,
mostly from African and Southeast Asian countries, along with fake
messages from unknown users, have flooded WhatsApp and Indians have
nowhere to go but Twitter to share their ordeal.
Meta-owned WhatsApp has close to 500 million users in India.
Although
the mobile numbers show country codes of Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia,
and Ethiopia, it is not necessary that these calls are actually coming
from these countries.
Most of these calls start with +251 (Ethiopia), +62 (Indonesia), +254 (Kenya), +84 (Vietnam) and other countries.
WhatsApp was yet to comment on the growing fake spam calls on its platform.
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