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Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

robertheaton.com

151–159 of 159 posts

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#151
post #145
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

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.

AFAIK, having either the mobile app or web interface in the foreground.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#152
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…

I'm using an xposed mod to continually be online on WhatsApp, even when my phone's screen if off. Would this thwart such attacks? I mean it would be an anomaly, but other than that I don't know what other information you could get, except the last Online/Offline never changing.

It confuses my friends though, who write me more at night times than usually, luckily though I've a DnD mode that saves me from waking up. (confuses gf too)

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#153
post #2

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

I suspect the opposite - given that whatsapp dominates texting in europe, and twice as many people live in europe as the USA (which is upon what i suspect you base your assumption here)

Oh come on, "whatsapp dominates texting in europe"? You do not know every country ;) Based on my experience it would actually be opposite, but I am not going to extrapolate to whole continent.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#154
post #13
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That depends on the country. In the US, people still tend to text a lot, but in most of Europe, Whatsapp totally replaced texting.

Source? Just last week I had to explain what whatsapp IS to my friend ... And he is young, what about older generation?

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#155
I don't see why people suddenly panic about it.. That's not a new thing. I wrote my own Tracking app over 2 years ago. I still have the code and database laying around. I was using https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup back then. Back then you could even see when people requested your online-status. Meaning you could see when they opened your chat. Back then I used that to see if my message have been read because the message-read notification didn't exist back then.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#156
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,…

I tried to do something like that over 2 years ago. I never got to work on the analyze part of the data. I still have a 2GB database of online/offline, status (text status thingy) and profile picture changes. Someday I'll get back to that data and analyze it.

Re: Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp

#157
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to know if it’s still working without heavy modifications?

Probably not, it used Chat-API [0], but the developer is kind of an asshole. But I admit, people just post stupid issues all the time. However I don't share the developers opinion that this was abused. My friends and I haven't received spam messages on Whatsapp. I admit that may be a small sample size, but still. [0] https://github.com/mgp25/Chat-API

I did the same about mid 2015 using yowsup (Python API to Whatsapp). But it's was a private project because of legality concerns of hoarding so much data.
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