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Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

robertheaton.com

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Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#131

Post by anilakar »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #109
anilakar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That'll be the boring part of the story. I just /msged her primary nick and asked nicely if it was possible to stop. Apparently the threat of losing anonymity is enough to turn trolls back to normal people.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#133

Post by yinyang_in »

jimmies wrote: post #28

If you trust those """services""" to be secure and trust that they care about your privacy, then you will be betrayed sooner or later, in ways you can't think of -- just like in the article. Fun fact, years ago I accidentally found out that my girlfriend at the time cheated on me on Snapchat, without me actually exploiting anything. She told me to join it with her, telling me that is going to be fun. Snapchat kept tr…

Dude was just curious, what services do you use now ?

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#134

Post by dredmorbius »

j_s wrote: post #106
kuschku wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Github activity profiles.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#135

Post by anfogoat »

The only issue here is that WhatsApp lets you see the status of people who don't have you as a contact. The rest is utterly underwhelming.

One thing I loved about ICQ-esque IM services was that you could clearly see whether a contact was online or not. I still feel weird starting a conversation on WhatsApp because of the lack of clear visual cues of the contact's status.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#136

Post by [deleted] »

anonu wrote: post #74
Havoc wrote: post #2

I suspect a fairly small percentage of users is active enough that you get usable hourly data.

I think there's more than 1.3 billion users on WhatsApp - its massive - I am personally checking it constantly (> once an hour) It's certainly a more popular app outside of the USA. They initially gained traction because they were willing to make apps for things other than iphones and androids - which gave them a huge following in the developing world where people may still use 10+ year old candy bars.

[deleted]

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#139

Post by jhasse »

100ideas wrote: post #115
polote wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong, if you deactivate the feature 'last seen at' it doesn't change anything because you can still get the same information with the feature 'is online now' and this feature can't be deactivated

Can't a user just remain logged-in on a second device 24/7?

IIRC you can't log in from two devices at once with WhatsApp.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#140

Post by kuschku »

pvorb wrote: post #123
kuschku wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, most normal working people are similar to the second person. 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.

I don't think one of them can be a working person. Both are texting all the time while they're awake.

Both of them are working, and have full jobs. The texts captured included technical support channels, slack-irc bridges, and more.
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