We all know the existence of wearable sleep trackers and even apps which monitor our sleep patterns. But did you know you can track the amount of sleep a person gets, their sleep time and wakeup time with the online status and the last seen status of Whatsapp using Whatsapp web?
Robert Heaton, a Software Engineer, wrote a chrome extension to hack the Whatsapp online activity on web.whatsapp.com with only 4 lines of javascript code. This chrome extension logs the online status of a person you want to track for every 10 seconds with WhatsApp exploit. For example, if a person goes offline between 11:00 pm and 7:30 am daily, then a person is getting a good amount of sleep. Otherwise, if a person is offline between 3:00 am and 7:30 am daily on Whatsapp then that particular person isn’t getting enough sleep.
Whatsapp provides us with a privacy feature of hiding the last seen feature from everyone and even the ones on your contact list. There might be a chance that a person can hide their last seen status but Whatsapp doesn’t allow to hide the Online status. So, the recordings can be made with the Online status of a person.
This Chrome extension can be used to find whether a person is texting a specific person or not. If you wish to find whether two particular persons are having a conversation for a long time, all you have to do is to log their online status. Check if there is any correlation between the two online status. A person is likely having a conversation with the other if there is a high correlation in their online and offline status.
The sleep patterns of a person can be known with the Facebook last seen too, but the problem is you have to be friends with that particular person to record their details. But, you just need to know the opposite person’s contact number in Whatsapp. In case, it is easier to write a program for Facebook, because, it sends data to your browser using straightforward HTTP requests. However, WhatsApp communicates with your browser using a much more complex Web Sockets-based protocol. So, Robert chose an easier way which is to write a Google Chrome extension to record the contents of web.whatsapp.com
If you could expand your monitoring capacity, you would hugely be benefitted. Heaton says that you can even start a company which runs a service that takes a phone number and returns WhatsApp usage for that number and this information can be sold to health insurers and credit agencies, which are suspicious of people who are awake at 4 am.
What do you think about this Whatsapp exploit? Share your views in the comments below!
