I really hate the online notification in WhatsApp because it's not possible to disable it. Even Facebook lets you appear offline if you want to. It's been a standard feature of messaging apps since pretty much as long as they've existed. Why whatsapp chose to make this setting like this has always just made my brain hurt.<p>Does anyone actually like that every time you open WhatsApp any person who has WhatsApp installed and has your number in their contact list, they can see that you opened the app with zero way to disable it? That would be bad enough on a desktop app, on a mobile app it's completely and utterly fucked.
I'll never understand this kind of framing. Why not "How cyberstalkers are using a WhatsApp status loophole"? I mean it's not like WA added the loophole in an enthusiastic attempt to "aid" cyberstalkers.
> Acceptable forms of these apps can be used by parents to track their children. However, these apps cannot be used to track a person (a spouse, for example) without their knowledge or permission unless a persistent notification is displayed while the data is being transmitted.<p>Why is it ethical to track children, but not adults? If phones existed when I was a kid, I would have been horrified to discover my parents had installed spyware on my phone.
The whole "protecting children" thing ... these apps are no better when used to watch your kids than they are when used to spy on your spouse.<p>Spying on kids is just as creepy as spying on a spouse imo, and the whole "it comes from a place of love and concern" can apply to both just as well. It's all excuses by overzealous parents. Shit should be outlawed, period, none of these creepy exceptions.
I haven't technically validated it, but it looks like this is also the case for the Matrix protocol. If a user is in a public room, then their presence gets encoded as part of the message history. If the room is fully public, anybody can come along and get the historical info.<p>It's possible to turn off presence but only on the server level.
Would it be possible to run WhatsApp in a sandbox, and let the sandbox perform the messaging through an API which other (more secure) chat clients can use to relay messages to/from the WhatsApp network?
Stating the obivious (with quote from the areticle):<p>"As an alternative to changing your number, you could try switching from WhatsApp to Signal, a popular, privacy-focussed instant messaging app. It’s very similar to WhatsApp but built with greater concern for privacy and security. It does not have the same online or last seen statuses as WhatsApp and can’t be tracked in the same way."