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Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

robertheaton.com

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Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#141

Post by mnw21cam »

KGIII wrote: post #79
kuschku wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Waybackwhen in 1998, when ICQ was a thing, I had an ICQ client on my Amiga that was scriptable. It was fairly trivial to write a quick program to tell it to change status at random times, to confuse people as to my whereabouts.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#142

Post by slig »

helloindia wrote: post #126
antoaravinth wrote: post #110

I might be wrong here, but what if I change my settings to "not show the last seen status"? I guess in that case this doesn't work. Yes, I believe checking "Online" status frequently does give some information about my activity. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

I was thinking the same. I haven't seen any of my friend with last seen status enabled.

If you disable on your account, you can't see the last seen status of your friends, even if they have it enabled.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#143

Post by inetknght »

anilakar wrote: post #131
whamlastxmas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is, in a nutshell, the secret of the internet.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#145

Post by NasKe »

polote wrote: post #25
tcmb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has to stop using WhatsApp, the scenario described in the article can be prevented simply by changing the app's privacy settings.

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

What count as "online"? Using the app? Does the web app also track that? I don't think this is disclosed by facebook, it would be nice to experiment to check it.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#146

Post by thecrazyone »

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?

The troll was never heard from again. He was made to "disappear" :D

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#147

Post by thecrazyone »

dx034 wrote: post #122
j_s wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Tor busts follow a similar pattern, watching both ends of the connection. There is a real need for a "tor delay" metadata-disruption-as-a-service, where random strangers invoke one another's web callbacks and report back the result in exchange for Bitcoin (Strangers on a Train -style). Someone put it on the block chain and start an ICO!

same risk as hosting an exit node. It could take a while convincing police that you obfuscated traffic patterns without any involvement in the crimes they're after. I think most people wouldn't want to take that risk.

Either you are missing the point or I am.

As I understand random strangers are logged on to tor and invoke each others' callbacks and give back results. Since all of them are anonymized, This is not at all similar to an exit node.

The only purpose of this is to make tor packet traffic patterns hard to follow :)

This could be a service, but not sure if this can be filtered out by the snooper. These will be one off requests from random nodes and will not affect your tor traffic pattern much because I posit the signal to noise ratio of your main activity will be pretty high. Hmm, :thinking: perhaps if we jack up this random traffic, would that hide your main traffic maybe.

Anyone who knows such analyses want to chime in? :)

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#148

Post by thecrazyone »

kuschku wrote: post #76
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,…

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…

wow! I find the images creepy and amazing at the same time :)

PS: It's not so much the images themselves but what they mean i.e. this analysis :)

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#149

Post by thecrazyone »

amelius wrote: post #53
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,…

A similar indirect way can be used to extract information out of Google's database. For example, launch an ad-campaign for any product, directed at people who love cats. Now if people click on the ad and buy the product, you know they must love cats.

This might seem like a brilliant idea, but you'll run out of money before you map all people for all things.

If you have so much money (spit balling here), you could buy google itself I think

There are easier ways to get data on people like their social profiles, and other online breadcrumbs like yelp reviews, any digital footprint really.

Another way is to buy databases of people. People have databases of HNIs, etc that you can purchase. This of course doesn't lend itself to much analysis but if the main purpose was to market to them or something like that, then databases work best :)

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