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Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

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Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#101

Post by cassowary »

jimmies wrote: post #98
komali2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not by any means a Snapchat power user. But I really like the way my phone tells me where my normal photos are taken — it makes it very easy to find the photos. Also, any chat app would benefit because it's very easy for me to remember "i was talking about foo with Bar when I was over in Baz", but much harder for me to remember when that happened. So to me location tracking would offer many useful features. (They may not be worth it, and even the useful ones might not be available, but those aren't answers to the question you asked.)

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#102

Post by joshvm »

rconti wrote: post #30
raarts wrote: post #13

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)

I don't know why this was downvoted, because absolutely this is why I started to use WhatsApp. Though the main problem is very high international SMS/call charges. I was in an international distance relationship a couple of years ago, and doing anything over cellular would have bankrupted me.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#103

Post by jimmies »

jimmies wrote: post #98
komali2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@cassowary, geotagging your photos can be done without logging your location on the server. It can be done locally. Plus, I thought that Snapchat does not keep the pictures you've taken? (I have been out of that since then, so I don't know.)

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#105

Post by ReverseCold »

komali2 wrote: post #90
ReverseCold wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use the map it asks you if you want to turn it on, most people click through it looks like. Now someone write a PoC to keep a log of where everyone goes.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#106

Post by j_s »

kuschku wrote: post #92
KGIII wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See also: timestamps when HN comments are posted.

This is much more interesting because pretty much everyone only participates in discussions when posts are on the front page - it would be tough to schedule/delay a post and stay relevant. Also, the lock-in after 1 hour (or a reply) preventing deletion is huge.

Some HN participants are now kind of "whales" in the startup community - at the very least, this info could be used to schedule cold-pitch emails! (And this is across the entire archive of past users, not just current users. These habits need not necessarily change much.)

Timestamp metadata is all over the place - GitHub activity graph, blog post comments, etc. -- merging timestamps for the same person across their accounts on all the different services offers amazing insights.

The only way to "disable" this is to schedule things or provide garbage data (only when user input is given precedence - like with this tool: https://www.laurencegellert.com/software/github-graph-builde...).

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#107

Post by wongarsu »

hnaccy wrote: post #69
zaat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* SMS delivery isn't guaranteed. * SMS don't have read receipt. * SMS depends on cellular connectivity. * SMS and MMS have very limited media transfer support. * SMS don't have feature similar to groups.

>* SMS don't have read receipt. I feel like this is a pro.

You can disable it in WhatsApp.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#108

Post by cassowary »

tcmb wrote: post #22
yoavm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it really depends where. I believe here, where WhatsApp is pretty much the _only_ method of communication, people most definitely check it every few minutes, and especially before they go to bed.

Honest question, isn't this what notifications and icon badges are for? It's easy to see if there's anything new without opening the app. Related question, does WhatsApp send the heartbeat only when I open the app, or every x minutes as long as it has a network connection?

The notification and icon badges help hide when you're sleeping, but they advertise when you're interacting with someone. You're "unseen" for twenty hours. The guy you're cheating with logs in and sends you a message. Five minutes later, you log in and read it. You wait two hours, read it again and send another message. He doesn't check for an hour. You're so longing for his response, so every five minutes you're logging in "how many ticks? what color? has he read it yet??". Once he's out of his meeting, he (finally noticing the notification) logs in and sends a message. Your activity drops off now that you have your reply, but you nevertheless send yours...

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#109

Post by whamlastxmas »

anilakar wrote: post #88
antirez wrote: post #34

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,…

Once I hacked together a similar program to log the terminal activity of fellow students on the university UNIX and Linux servers: https://github.com/andyn/actspy/blob/master/actspy.c The main objective, however, was not to stalk innocent users but to catch an anonymous IRC troll who was using an identless shell server in order to hide their real account name. Every time the troll wrote to IRC, the activity logger pr…

So what happened after finding out who it was?
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