It’s a wonder nobody has thought about doing something like this, but someone finally did. Software engineer Robert Heaton had an idea in mind – to track a friend’s sleep patterns using said person’s usage of the ubiquitous messaging app WhatsApp. And while doing so would require pretty specific usage patterns, Heaton actually proves it can be done.
Heaton decided to use WhatsApp because using the other ubiquitous messaging app – Facebook Messenger – required you to be friends in Facebook with your target. In WhatsApp, you only need to know the phone number of the person, if he or she isn’t already one of your contacts, and write some code to monitor the persons’s “last seen” statuses on WhatsApp. It’s been pointed out – since Heaton’s semi-hilarious, semi-scary article came out – that the “last seen” status can indeed be hidden, but the “online” status can’t – so a person monitoring someone could easily use that.
With some code – which came easy to a software engineer – Heaton could write a Chrome extension that would do the monitoring for you automatically, logging the online status of the person you were watching. From the patterns of online activity, you can actually infer the regular sleep and waking patterns of a person.
That may not seem like much, but when a person sleeps and wakes up is a very private matter. If you can get the phone number of a stranger, and that stranger uses WhatsApp religiously, then that information is theoretically available to someone who would want to monitor that person’s activities. Hopefully, WhatsApp can respond to this and put out a fix.
SOURCE: Robert Heaton
This is fear mongering clickbait