‘WhatsApp activity can be mapped with a simple extension’

Software designer Rob Heaton has shown with a simple extension that it is quite easy to record someone’s activity in WhatsApp and derive patterns from activities from someone’s private life. This is done by mapping the online status.

Heaton was able to find out the last time someone’s contacts were online via a simple Chrome extension using just four lines of JavaScript code. If this data is stored for a period of time, quite a few patterns can be derived from it.

For example, it can be deduced from the data when a user sleeps and wakes up. Also, with a little more time and linking the data of different users, it can be determined with some degree of certainty who was chatting with whom at certain times. Earlier, another developer also discovered that it is quite easy to get information about someone’s WhatsApp contacts via the web interface.

This cannot be blocked with WhatsApp’s privacy settings. Although users can protect the ‘last seen status’, this option does not apply to the online status, so that you can find out when someone was active on WhatsApp.

According to Heaton, this data can be collected fairly easily on a large scale, after which the data can be sold, for example, to third parties, such as insurance companies, who may be interested in people who are systematically up in the middle of the night.