How to know who your WhatsApp contacts are talking to

Be very careful with what you do and say through WhatsApp. Because anyone could find out who you're talking to. A new vulnerability has just been discovered that affects the messaging service and can expose even your sleep patterns. Spyers could know exactly what time you go to sleep and what time you wake up.

Be careful, because one of the biggest dangers of this vulnerability has to do with how easy it can be for anyone to find out this data. It would be enough to have a little technical training and a computer at hand.

But what exactly is happening? As explained by The Next Web, it seems that the problem lies in the information about the last time a contact has connected or viewed WhatsApp The spies could monitor your activity in the messaging service.

A security flaw that exposes users

There is nothing you can do to prevent anyone technically savvy from monitoring your activity on WhatsApp And this is truly worrying. But why? First of all, it should be remembered that the messaging service has a feature that allows users to stop showing the last connection time to other contacts. There is also the possibility to stop marking messages as read (with the blue double check).

However, you cannot hide when you are online Thus, when you actively use WhatsApp, the rest of users will always see that you are online. This is the feature that can help bad guys watch the way you connect.

The proof that this is the case comes from Rob Heaton, who is the engineer who has dedicated himself to carrying out tests and crossing data to make these deductions. This expert wanted to demonstrate how it is possible to use connection data to create a pattern and use it for malicious purposes.

To achieve this, Heaton created a Chrome extension dedicated to observing and recording the online activity of WhatsApp contacts. These data were used to know when a person goes to sleep and when they get up.

The matter becomes even more worrisome when contact activity patterns intersectWhat this professional did was analyze how users are connecting and analyze the matches of the contacts when they are online. In this way, quite evident relationships can be established between different people.

Knowing who you're talking to on WhatsApp can be easy to guess

Heaton has shared via The Next Web a series of hand-drawn graphics, clearly showing what these patterns and interactions might look like .

However, the expert points out a problem that may be even more serious. And it is the fact that this data can be collected and sold on a large scale to third-party companies, for purely advertising purposes.

Points, for example, to the possibility that those users who, due to their activity on WhatsApp, can deduce that they have sleep problems, are prime candidates for information on sleep aids.

But be careful, we would not be facing a new problem. Messaging system developers have been aware of this for a long time. And in fact, some have done similar investigations with Facebook to get more juice out of the platform in terms of advertising