See Which of Your WhatsApp Contacts Have Spoken With This Creepy New App [updated]
Facebook spies on us all the time, and by extension on companies like Instagram and WhatsApp . Now, one app is changing position, allowing all the data they secretly collect to be used to spy on their friends and WhatsApp contacts.
Chatwatch uses WhatsApp’s public online / offline status feature that lets your friends know when you’re ready to talk. Using this data, the app can tell you how often your friends check WhatsApp. He can even estimate what time they go to bed and wake up each day.
Even more impressive (and aggressive), Chatwatch can combine WhatsApp data from two of your contacts to make an educated guess if they’ve spoken to each other. Basically, if two of your friends were online for the same consecutive five minutes in the predawn hours of the morning, chances are they were texting each other.
This is a creepy new trick that the app developers hope will bring more attention to how Facebook processes our data, as well as how other companies access and analyze it. It’s also very likely that WhatsApp will soon find a way to block Chatwatch. So if you want to spy on your friends to expose Facebook privacy issues, you should try it soon.
One little catch: Chatwatch isn’t free – it’s actually quite expensive. For $ 1.99, you get the ability to spy on two of your contacts for a week, so choose carefully. The developers say the money will go to support the app and fund an anti-Trump political nonprofit .
Chatwatch was originally launched on iOS but was later removed from the Apple App Store for unspecified reasons. It is currently available for Android and the developers are currently working on a web version as well.
Updated March 29, 3:41 PM ET: Updated accessibility information after removing Chatwatch from the App Store.