This creepy app exploits WhatsApp

san francisco — A new creepy app named Chatwatch is using WhatsApp’s online or offline status feature to tell users how often their friends check the microblogging platform and also estimate when they go to bed every day — potentially making it an invasive app.

Chatwatch takes advantage of WhatsApp’s public online/offline status, which lets your friends know when you’re readily available to talk.

“Using this data, the app can tell you how often your friends check WhatsApp. It can even estimate what time they go to sleep and wake up each day,” tech website LifeHacker reported.

This comes at a time when Facebook users are uninstalling apps they got connected with long ago via “Facebook log-in” after the social media platform, which also owns WhatsApp, was hit by a major data breach.

“It’s a creepy new trick that the app’s developers hope will bring more attention to how Facebook handles our data, along with how other companies access and analyse it,” the report added. “It’s also likely that WhatsApp will find a way to block Chatwatch soon. So if you want to spy on your friends expose Facebook’s privacy issues, you should try it soon.”

The app was first launched on iOS devices but it was later taken off from the Apple App Store.

Chatwatch is currently available on the Android platform and the developers are reportedly working on a Web-based version as well. —