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Maybe I'm in the minority, but I haven't ever used WhatsApp. Is there a huge benefit to using it over SMS, or something similar?
Obviously WeChat is not secure in any way, though ;)
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This isn’t just necessarily a problem with WhatsApp. The same applies to IRC, if you set away states. Even if you don’t set away states, one can simply monitor every channel you’re in, every message you send, and then quickly determine what timezone you’re in, when you sleep, when you’re on vacation, etc. Here’s an example graph of a user, every dot is a message: https://i.imgur.com/DrgVvVw.png and here one from a us…
In chat applications, those features were the first to get disabled. As I recall, one of the MSN Messenger features required you to sign in before you disabled it. Anyhow, I'd disable showing online status, typing status, or automatically changing status based on activity. This was a decade and a half ago, probably longer. The principle remains the same. No, no I don't want you to know when I'm in front of my compute…
There's no way to disable that.
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This isn’t just necessarily a problem with WhatsApp. The same applies to IRC, if you set away states. Even if you don’t set away states, one can simply monitor every channel you’re in, every message you send, and then quickly determine what timezone you’re in, when you sleep, when you’re on vacation, etc. Here’s an example graph of a user, every dot is a message: https://i.imgur.com/DrgVvVw.png and here one from a us…
Yikes, that second person is almost robotic in their sleep patterns.
Only few people have sleep patterns like me (first, erratic graph), and I have them because I spend often my nights working on projects, trying to build new products, and once I've started one, it's hard to stop.
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In chat applications, those features were the first to get disabled. As I recall, one of the MSN Messenger features required you to sign in before you disabled it. Anyhow, I'd disable showing online status, typing status, or automatically changing status based on activity. This was a decade and a half ago, probably longer. The principle remains the same. No, no I don't want you to know when I'm in front of my compute…
Those graphs are determined purely from messages - no away states, nothing There's no way to disable that.
* Entirely made up number.
Nevermind the clever writing but the issue has been known for years—and beautifully exploited with the selfhostable ready-made solution WhatsSpy Public since Feb 2015: https://gitlab.maikel.pro/maikeldus/WhatsSpy-Public/ It's not actively maintained anymore but Maikel deserves some credit for it.
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Those graphs are determined purely from messages - no away states, nothing There's no way to disable that.
Reason #32* to avoid the application. * Entirely made up number.
That's the one and simple trick.
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Reason #32* to avoid the application. * Entirely made up number.
If you're in a group chat, anyone that is in the same chats can see all your messages in there. That's the one and simple trick.
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Now it shows you the live current location of all your friends, no one I know has it turned off. Wth people?
This setting doesn't seem to be enabled by default, at least on Android. I just scrolled into settings > Who can... See My Location > Found it to be on "ghost mode (only me)." I never touched this setting before.
The real question isn't that what it sets by default, the question is why that chat app needs to know and log your location in the first place? Why does it not only get it and send it when you choose to share? What kind of enhancement does it give to your fucking """experience""" when it logs your location like that?
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This setting doesn't seem to be enabled by default, at least on Android. I just scrolled into settings > Who can... See My Location > Found it to be on "ghost mode (only me)." I never touched this setting before.
Only log me, but don't let my friends know: You know your privacy is respected jack shit when the least intrusive setting is letting the service know and log you, but not letting your friends know. The real question isn't that what it sets by default, the question is why that chat app needs to know and log your location in the first place? Why does it not only get it and send it when you choose to share? What kind of…
Shameless plug, I wrote a plugin for Chrome [1] and Firefox [2] to do just that.
(Facebook is the opposite of WhatsApp – you can disable your online/offline status, but not your idle time.)
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-network-cha...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/social-networ...