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Univ. of New Haven Cyber Lab: WhatsApp Collects Phone Numbers, Call Duration, and More

Posted by timothy on from the mere-metadata dept.

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.)

7 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Nobody gives a shit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seriously, everybody knows that WhatsApp was shite, is shite and will forever be shite. It does not matter. Everybody uses it, so everybody keeps using it. You would have to pay people to make them switch. It's not going to happen.

    1. Re:Nobody gives a shit. by hjf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's unbelievably slow, heavy, feature lacking. Useless web ui "whatsapp web" that takes ages to load and still requires you to have whatsapp open on your phone in order for it to work.

      You can't refuse to join groups: you're forcefully added and multimedia shit downloaded to your phone without your permission.

      Whatsapp also works very hard against "modders" and COMPLETELY REFUSES to let you run multiple phone numbers on a single phone: one person-one phone. Company number AND personal number? Fuck you. Dual sim phone? Fuck you very much. It's like facebook: ONE PERSON, ONE PROFILE. Multiple profiles? HACKER!!!!!! DELINQUENT!!!!

      Telegram is far lighter, runs on a lot of platforms and overall feels a lot more well built than this shit. Lose your phone? no problem, telegram is still open on your tablet, computer, or whatever device you want it to run on.

  2. Intelligence Collection by transfire · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Probably because Facebook is part of the Israeli intelligence apparatus. This is the same data collected by Amdocs, the Israeli company that handles virtually all records for land lines (http://www.tomflocco.com/fs/HouseHidesIsraeliTelSpying.htm)

  3. My Whatsapp status is permananently set to... by Assoluto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...Being tracked by Zuk

    I'm generally pretty privacy concious (use a VPN for all browsing, self destructing cookies, fake accounts everywhere, no account for Facebook, Twitter, etc). However, with your phone it's impossible to avoid being tracked by Google and Facebook. I have no mobile data plan and keep my Wifi off most of the time, but I still suspect they get a lot of data on me.

    Windows has gone in the same direction and it's impossible to use that without being tracked by Microsoft. Linux is the only remaining option for anyone with concerns about privacy. Sadly, most people don't have any concerns about privacy and don't realise how they can be harmed and exploited through their data.

    I think the privacy war is over, and we lost.

  4. LOL by campuscodi · · Score: 2

    Can someone replace the Net-Security link with the original source: http://www.newhaven.edu/news-e... Those infosec professionals just copy-pasted the original text on their website and are passing it as their own.

  5. Re:it's a messaging app! by Flavianoep · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  6. Re:it's a messaging app! by Flavianoep · · Score: 2

    You need someone's phone number to send them Whatsapp messages.

    --
    Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.