WhatsApp and the privacy of our data
Even though Facebook has a bad reputation, the fact remains that WhatsApp, the famous messaging app that is part of the group has always wanted to have an image of protector of personal data and privacy.
Yet in practice, it has been shown several times that the application allows other third-party software to have access to its users' data. In this way, giving them the ability to track the online activities of the user of the Messaging app. In other words, people know who to talk to. They know at what time you are sleeping and they know how long you are connected, and this without the user's knowledge. "These intrusive applications show that even services that strongly protect users' privacy in some way — like WhatsApp, which is committed to encrypting messages — can still expose data that can be used to trace their users. WhatsApp's vulnerability comes from the service that publicly indicates whether a user is "online" (i.e. if they are using the app) at any given time. Isolated, this is relatively harmless information. says Business Insider.
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To the extent that this application in the ability to collect for a long time personal data, using the set of tools available to them, they have the opportunity to define very well detailed profiles of people "monitored"
But we need to clarify a point that may be going in the positive direction of things, these applications will not expose the data collected for the user. It should just be used to define profiles that can be presented to future advertisers. They do not identify the content of user-to-user exchanges. "But they present themselves to potential customers as tools to know when other people are sleeping, when they're using WhatsApp, and even who they're talking to on the app — what they get to know by comparing multiple people's activity logs and seeing which ones match. Business Insider says.
They are almost compared to tracing applications, which are used for unconventional monitoring, Stalkerwares.
"It's easy to imagine what an abuser could do with this information or, for example, an employer who would use it to find out if his employees are talking on WhatsApp during their work day, or a law enforcement official who would see if people were talking on WhatsApp during a demonstration." Cooper Quintin, senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explained when asked about WhatsApp's surveillance software. "I don't see any legitimate good use of these applications. He adds.
Caught up in the popular fervor that res koreans of Facebook for its new terms of use, the messaging service wanted to clarify some details in a statement made by its spokesperson: "WhatsApp provides privacy control tools to users to protect their profile picture, their "about" status and the "seen to" option for messages received. We maintain automated abuse control systems that identify and prevent abuse of applications that attempt to detect whatsApp users' information, and we are constantly working to improve our systems over time. We also ask app stores to remove apps that abuse our brand and violate our terms of use. ».
Yet it was recently discovered, an application that allows iPhones to have access to the content of exchanges on WhatsApp. This kind of application to make it more and more on the official blinds of application. These include the AppStore or the PlayStore. This is of course likely to worry and raise questions about the analyses that Google or Apple perform at the level of their blinds. At this time, neither company has commented on this situation. But it can be remembered that their policy and normally contrary to the proliferation of this kind of spyware. Don't they promise to protect against all this.
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