As we progress with the whole new generation of the digital world, the more vulnerable our privacy is becoming, WhatsApp Messenger, an instant messaging application which is currently used by more than 1 billion people in over 180 countries to stay in touch with their friends and family. It’s freely available to every smartphone user.
What makes this application so user-friendly is that it doesn’t need any username or password you only need the contact number of your friend or family saved in your smartphone and have the application installed.
The information it collects, apart from the info you provide:
1. Contacts in your address book:
After you agree to the terms and conditions during the installation it automatically retrieves all the contacts in your address book and this happens on a regular basis, meaning WhatsApp takes the hold of all the contacts (only the contacts who has agreed to the Service of WhatsApp )that you have in your storage.
2. Instant messages:
When you send a message to the other contact it WhatsApp saves them in their server unless the message is delivered to its recipient, once delivered it automatically deletes the message from its server, if not then it deletes the message after 30 days till that time WhatsApp keeps retrying.
3. ‘Last seen’ timestamp:
WhatsApp also keeps a track of your online activity by storing the timestamp when you last accessed the service, this can be customized under the privacy settings.
4. Device information:
WhatsApp also collects the device information: Hardware model, IP address, mobile network information and the location information as well if you have accessed the location services or someone has shared the location coordinates for ‘diagnostic purposes’.
5. Cookies:
As part of cookies in the smartphone or desktop web browser, WhatsApp collects the data such as FAQ choices, and other relevant data for improving the web-based services.
Apart from this WhatsApp also stores all the contacts present in a group chat, and so anyone can access that contact number provided you are in that group chat.
Just imagine how many contacts can be exposed to someone who is in a group chat which is having contacts, not in his/her address book.
There have been many allegations by the Germany’s Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information to WhatsApp that it is violating the data privacy laws by storing all the contact information for a user (point #1 above), WhatsApp seems to be unresponsive to this allegation.
There is an easy way to fetch all the contact information in a group chat using developer tools in google chrome (or any other browser) desktop while accessing web WhatsApp
Just open the dev tools and inspect the region under the group chat name, like in the picture below :
You just need to copy the information on the highlighted area and paste it to notepad.
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