Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
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Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
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Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#2I love these short write-ups of security issues of things the company in charge does not think is a problem.
I remember that the facebook messenger was leaking the same kind of data and facebook said it's not a bug and didn't change it.
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#3I love these short write-ups of security issues of things the company in charge does not think is a problem. I remember that the facebook messenger was leaking the same kind of data and facebook said it's not a bug and didn't change it.
Why is this a "security" issue? People know that other people can see their "last seen" date, but usually they don't care so they left it. Hell, I leave it public as well. I couldn't care less about this tiny details.
Now, if you tell me that by leaving public my "last seen" date, people can get more data about me (e.g., with whom I talk to), well then yes, I would call that a security issue.
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#4I love these short write-ups of security issues of things the company in charge does not think is a problem. I remember that the facebook messenger was leaking the same kind of data and facebook said it's not a bug and didn't change it.
Why is this a "security" issue? People know that other people can see their "last seen" date, but usually they don't care so they left it. Hell, I leave it public as well. I couldn't care less about this tiny details. Now, if you tell me that by leaving public my "last seen" date, people can get more data about me (e.g., with whom I talk to), well then yes, I would call that a security issue.
The most interesting part to me wasn't the technical details but rather the MAU, WAU, DAU stats at the end from random sample. Way fewer people than I would have expected use WhatsApp on a weekly basis.
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#5> Privacy setting for Last Seen: Set by default to Everyone and nobody configures it.
It surprised me that only 10% of his random (French) sample is active daily (179/1751=10%). In my contacts, I do see people who have accounts but haven't used it in weeks, but it's not the norm. However, I see lots of people in my contacts who show no info for Last Seen. Is he underestimating how often people configure the privacy setting for Last Seen? Or perhaps there is another factor that determines when Last Seen gets shown?
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this a "security" issue? People know that other people can see their "last seen" date, but usually they don't care so they left it. Hell, I leave it public as well. I couldn't care less about this tiny details. Now, if you tell me that by leaving public my "last seen" date, people can get more data about me (e.g., with whom I talk to), well then yes, I would call that a security issue.
The most interesting part to me wasn't the technical details but rather the MAU, WAU, DAU stats at the end from random sample. Way fewer people than I would have expected use WhatsApp on a weekly basis.
This is in France, where text messages were free (unlimited with your subscription) long ago before we had internet on our smartphone.
Thus people use text message a lot and did use WhatsApp only to contact people outside from France
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#7It's bad that this is happening, but from a developer standpoint it is also very easy to overlook things like this because most APIs are not aware of who the data is for.
When an API always returns the `last_seen` field regardless of who is querying the data, it's very easy to make the mistake to present the data to someone who should not see it.
That's also one of the reasons I think most CRUD APIs use bad practice because they always return all data on a READ and may always store all data on a CREATE or UPDATE.
But.. a company like Facebook should know better. It seems they just don't care.
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#8I love these short write-ups of security issues of things the company in charge does not think is a problem. I remember that the facebook messenger was leaking the same kind of data and facebook said it's not a bug and didn't change it.
Why is this a "security" issue? People know that other people can see their "last seen" date, but usually they don't care so they left it. Hell, I leave it public as well. I couldn't care less about this tiny details. Now, if you tell me that by leaving public my "last seen" date, people can get more data about me (e.g., with whom I talk to), well then yes, I would call that a security issue.
What was interesting in my writing is that a simple API request quota could be preventing me from scraping this much.
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#9[deleted]
Re: Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most interesting part to me wasn't the technical details but rather the MAU, WAU, DAU stats at the end from random sample. Way fewer people than I would have expected use WhatsApp on a weekly basis.
This is in France, where text messages were free (unlimited with your subscription) long ago before we had internet on our smartphone. Thus people use text message a lot and did use WhatsApp only to contact people outside from France
Not in France actually, we mainly use WhatsApp as a main message app; nobody uses SMS nowadays