WhatsApp Messenger is one of the world’s most popular messaging application used by billion of users across the globe. There are lot of users who are constantly chatting with their friends and families on WhatsApp which affect their Sleeping patterns.
Now a Software Engineer, Rob Heaton says that it is possible to track WhatsApp users Sleeping patterns along with whom they talk by tracking the users “Online Status” on a consistent basics.
He confirms that by using an Extension which tracks the changes in the WhatsApp status it is possible to track the sleeping patterns of lot of users. WhatsApp users already have an option of either hide their last seen with everyone, or just their contacts.
Heaton suggests that by creating an Chrome extension it is easy to create a privacy log of the activity on the messenger which can be used by an attacker who is using WhatsApp Web.
The Extension can be created in a four line JavaScript code as below:
setInterval(function() {
var lastSeen = $(‘.pane-header .chat-body .emojitext’).last().text();
console.log(Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) + “, ” + lastSeen);
}, 1000);
The code helps attackers to collect large amounts of data on the activity and help them to analyse to get an idea as to when the user sleeps and at what time they wake up on a particular day of the week.
The extension can also be modified to log the activity of multiple individuals and can be used to check the activity of both users over a specific time period to find out if they are talking to one another and the length of time they have been talking to each other.
Such schemes can be used to collect data on a large scale and sold to health companies who generally are interested in knowing the individuals sleeping patterns. Heaton says that though it is possible to know the Sleeping patterns, but this activity cannot be termed as a vulnerability.
