41–50 of 159 posts
I suspect a fairly small percentage of users is active enough that you get usable hourly data.
I agree with you, whatsapp is not like Tinder or Facebook you don't open it every 2 minutes to check if there is something new.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on the country. In the US, people still tend to text a lot, but in most of Europe, Whatsapp totally replaced texting.
Is this because of their still-utterly-broken roaming model? (supposedly to be remedied soon)
A few weeks ago there was a similar discussion, and I commented the following: If you think there is no problem, you are wrong. The blog post does not show all the information leaks that this implies. Example: I can modify the script to monitor all the numbers I've in my phone, so that based on the online/offline status in a few weeks I can be able to guess who is having conversations together, discovering cheatings,…
Moreover if people are using all the time Whatsapp, it is again much more difficult to do.
But I agree with you, there are many situations where these could work
What I don't like about WhatsApp is that even if you hide your last connection time, everybody gets to see whether you're online.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another startup idea.
The idea being you incentive WhatsApp users to install your app that then harvests all their contacts and collates the "last seen" info on all of them. If they delete your app, you setup a proxy to imitate their device and continue the monitoring. Have a privacy policy that is super strong but has a couple "loopholes" that one can drive a truck through. Is that the idea? Seems doable if you're not too risk averse, ha…
Creating an app with the sole purpose of backdooring WhatsApp on a user's phone seems like it'd open you up to a lot of lawsuits. Ethically its a mite more questionable, but the original article is still unethical in that you're monitoring people without consent.
Like I said above, I'd do this just so that they'd crack down on it. It's still a "means justify the ends" argument, however, so you have to be quite comfortable with moral relativism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on the country. In the US, people still tend to text a lot, but in most of Europe, Whatsapp totally replaced texting.
Is this because of their still-utterly-broken roaming model? (supposedly to be remedied soon)
And here the problem begins, a lot of software engineers seem to conflate this disinterest to stupidity and think this gives them a right to do whatever they want with other people's data.
There is a fundamental lack of understanding and respect of other people rights and privacy and an easy dehumanization that is disconnected from human society and the evolution of fundamental rights like like the right to privacy. Regulation will catch up and eventually address this as more people become aware but is a troubling reflection of a large part of the software ecosystem.
A few weeks ago there was a similar discussion, and I commented the following: If you think there is no problem, you are wrong. The blog post does not show all the information leaks that this implies. Example: I can modify the script to monitor all the numbers I've in my phone, so that based on the online/offline status in a few weeks I can be able to guess who is having conversations together, discovering cheatings,…
The thing is, this method works pretty well if people are chatting in real time, if you wait like 10 minutes to answers messages, it is much more difficult to create the links. Moreover if people are using all the time Whatsapp, it is again much more difficult to do. But I agree with you, there are many situations where these could work
I suspect a fairly small percentage of users is active enough that you get usable hourly data.