Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones

Post by peterjmag » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

IneffablePigeon wrote: post #26

gridder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are online anyone can check it. There is no option to hide the online status. Using an easy script anyone can then spy and understand pretty much everything of a person, or a group. This is easy cyber stalking and dangerous. Especially because normal people do not understand this and think that hiding last seen is useful to avoid being stalked…

You can absolutely hide it - it's in the settings, as mentioned in the article. The tradeoff is you won't be able to see anyone else's status. I do agree I don't particularly like that it's on by default.

Post by kzrdude » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

m_st wrote: post #21

puttycat wrote: post #14

I've been using WhatsApp for years, reluctantly since it is the de-facto SMS standard in my country. I will never, ever, understand the "online" status feature. It is ridiculously invasive and cannot ever be turned off or even hidden from specific contacts. This is a SMS client, not a chat client, and revealing a user's online status is highly problematic both socially and security-wise. I can't help but wonder how m…

I totally agree. Except that I very much call it a chat client. It is way beyond SMS.

Post by Grimm1 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

outime wrote: post #34

>Nobody uses Signal in France [from the 5000 sample] If one would've come to HN and read the last few months worth of posts you'd come to think that a lot of people from around the world moved to Signal. But then again this is a reminder about how little HN represents compared to the general population's tech choices.

Post by outime » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

Grimm1 wrote: post #35

outime wrote: post #34

>Nobody uses Signal in France [from the 5000 sample] If one would've come to HN and read the last few months worth of posts you'd come to think that a lot of people from around the world moved to Signal. But then again this is a reminder about how little HN represents compared to the general population's tech choices.

My anecdata but, my friend in France does and has been forever. That's how her and I keep in contact and video chat. Perhaps their sample wasn't representative.

Post by hiq » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #38

Is there any chance that the client needs the online status for some internal optimization, e.g. in order to deliver messages for online contacts to a different server than those destined for offline contacts? I could imagine delivery paths to be quite different (one would be immediately passed through in-memory while the other would be stored in some database and potentially trigger mobile push notifications). In th…