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 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 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!
