If you rely on WhatsApp to message your friends and family, it is important to know that the service lets your contact know about when you are available to chat, and whether you have read their texts.
That is not all, Lifehacker has spotted a new iOS app called Chatwatch that uses WhatsApp's public online/offline status feature to tell your friends how often you check the app and estimate when they go to bed each day; it can even correlate data on two contacts you choose to guess if they have been talking to each other.
There is no need to give anyone that sort of ammo, C'mon, some apps honestly just want to see the world crumble and society burn to death. A lot of users might prefer to maintain a low profile on messaging services so they can chat and respond to texts on their own time.
It is rather alarming to know that you can be spied on by your contacts. The company says that there is not a whole lot you can do about it, even if you have disabled the 'Last Seen' feature in your account settings, it will still be able to figure out your WhatsApp activity.
The Chatwatch app does need 24 hours before it can generate certain insights, but the first feature – revealing how often your friends check WhatsApp – seems plausible, if you are a stalker. Naturally, it would be great to see WhatsApp disable this functionality so we can maintain at least a semblance of a private life.
For now, you will have to hope and pray that your contact is too stingy to shell out the minimum subscription fee of $2 (to spy on any two numbers for a week) to keep an eye on you.
