PSA: Anyone can tell if you are using WhatsApp on your computer
Reading Time: 2 minutesAnyone who knows your WhatsApp number can figure out if you are only using the mobile app, or its companion web or desktop apps, a security researcher found.
While revealing where users have WhatsApp running is not the most dangerous leak of information, digital security experts agree that it’s not an ideal situation, and, in some cases, it could help hackers target WhatsApp users.
‘It at least tells you more about the devices they use and how ‘accessible’ their WhatsApp setup may be,’ said Sandivk, who is the founder of Granitt, a startup that aims to train at-risk people like journalists, activists and politicians.
‘It used to be the case that your phone had to be online to receive messages and that provided significant limitations for people. With multi device users can send and receive their personal messages across devices privately with end-to-end encryption — and that’s the direction we’ll continue to take,’ Alsawah said in a statement.
Harlo Holmes, the chief information security officer and director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that being able to tell on which devices people are using WhatsApp is a privacy issue.
Referring to the ability to disable read receipts and typing indicators on WhatsApp, Holmes said that WhatsApp should offer a similar opt-out feature for device indicators.
In practice, Holmes said, ‘perhaps a stalker could deduce that I’m at home or not, depending on which device I used.’
Be’ery wrote in his blog post explaining the data leak that it is a consequence of the way WhatsApp is designed: When someone sends a message to another WhatsApp user, their device creates a different session key for each device the receiver is using, thus telling the sender how many devices the receiver is using.
In other words, there is nothing a person can do to prevent others from seeing this type of information. And WhatsApp isn’t going to change how the app works either — at least for now.
Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/17/psa-whatsapp-number-desktop-computer/
Ref: techcrunch
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