Our WhatsApp isn’t safe anymore as we perceive it to be according to online portal Thenextweb.com. Though we believe our messages are encrypted on WhatsApp protecting our chats from third parties, the aforementioned news portal has an opposing opinion.
According to their theory — at least the one that’s easily understandable. WhatsApp is encrypted end-to-end, so the contents of the messages can’t be seen. But there’s plenty of other information (metadata) that can be tracked.
An app has been discovered that actually help other people collect personal data of you just by having your WhatsApp number, they can collect your data without your consent and fair enough, you can also use it to collect other people’s data too.
The app is called ChatWatch. It enables your WhatsApp contact list to know when you are available to chat, whether you are reading their messages or not and bizarrely, the time you are sleeping each night.
To do this, Chatwatch digs into WhatsApp’s publicly available online/offline feature that tells your friends what your availability is.
It uses this to tell people how often you check the app and roughly when you bed down for the night.
According to Thenextweb.com, Chatwatch is still able to collect this data even if you have deactivated the last seen option in your WhatsApp settings.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the app seems to be have been deleted from both Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store which serve Android devices.
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