I always see claims like this but never with actual evidence or research done. On Android, I can spoof the microphone access permission so that Whatsapp thinks

I always see claims like this but never with actual evidence or research done. On Android, I can spoof the microphone access permission so that Whatsapp thinks it has access. I can then log whenever this permission is being used while giving it spoofed data. I have it done this for many apps and unsurprisingly, most try to access the microphone in the background over and over again. I have not done this experiment with Whatsapp yet, though. What I use for this is XPrivacyLua by M66B, which also has suppory for scriptable hooks in Lua.