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Univ. of New Haven Cyber Lab: WhatsApp Collects Phone Numbers, Call Duration, and More
An anonymous reader writes: A recent network forensic examination of popular messaging service WhatsApp at the University of New Haven's Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group is offering new details on the data that can be collected from the app's network from its new calling feature: such as phone numbers and phone call duration, and highlights areas for future research and study. The researchers provided an outline of the WhatsApp messaging protocol from a networking perspective, making it possible to explore and study WhatsApp network communications. (Also noted at The Register.)
Because in Brazil, a each SMS message (about 150B) costs about US$ 0,13, but for about US$ 0,20 money you can use 50MB of data for a day. People uses Whatsapp here because it's cheaper.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
In the USA, I can't get why people would use Whatsapp, having SMS virtually for free.
In most of the rest of the world, only technically inepts or ignorants would use SMS, because for most people a mobile call cost the same or less than a single fucking SMS.
And Whatsapp is so simple and featureless that you can explain it in five minutes to your grandma, and from then on the only trouble she would have will be finding the right key on her Android keyboard. Install an use, no user IDs, no password, no nothing, and all your family and friends appear thee automagically.
In Spain you can pay 1 euro a month for 100Mb of mobile Internet, and SMS usually cost 18 cents a message. As you can imagine, nearly nobody uses SMS anymore. It is cheaper by far buying a cheap smarphone and Whatsapp than buying a dumbphone and send SMS. A lot of people uses their smartphones basically as Whatsapp terminals: no calls, no SMS.
People here calls people with no Whatsapp who sends SMS "amigos caros" ("expensive friends"), because message exchanges with them usually skyrocket your mobile charges.