This app allows users to spy on their WhatsApp contacts; taken down from iOS

Chatwatch is an app that lets users track when their friends or contacts are online on WhatsApp, even in cases when 'Last Seen' is hidden by the other user.

    

Chatwatch is an app that lets users spy on when their friends, contacts are online on WhatsApp. (Representational Image. AP)

Chatwatch is an app that lets users track when their friends or contacts are online on WhatsApp, even in cases when ‘Last Seen’ is hidden by the other user. The app appears to be exploiting the ‘online status’ feature, which is present on WhatsApp and works regardless of whether the user has kept their status as invisible for all. To be clear, one cannot read or spy on the messages their friends or contacts are sending via WhatsApp, it only lets you see when a contact is online.

The app, which was highlighted by LifeHacker, is a paid one on iOS, and though it is free on Android, Chatwatch has in-app purchases as well. However, it looks like Chatwatch has been taken down from iOS. A message on the company’s website says, “For reasons unknown to us, Apple has suspended our app from the app store. We are working on a web version to launch tomorrow the latest, and appealing the decision with Apple. Please enter your email to receive notification for the web version and a discount.” The app is priced at $1.99, according to LifeHacker.

The description for Chatwatch, claims that it will help users answer questions like “Who were you chatting with at 3am?!” The app says it will help users monitor friends, family or employees’ Whatsapp online/offline activity, even when their last seen is hidden. Chatwatch takes it a step further by letting users compare chat patterns between people they know, and the app will tell a user the probability of them (their two friends or contacts) talking to each other during the day. Chatwatch says it is “using Artificial Intelligence” to calculate this probability.

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Chatwatch apparently needs 24 hours before it can generate reports, claims another report on TheNextWeb. This is not the first time that possible flaws in the online status feature on WhatsApp have been pointed out. Previously software engineer Robert Theaton had written a blogpost highlighting how the WhatsApp feature could be exploited. Theaton has used WhatsApp Web to start tracking the last seen settings for a user and managed to create a pattern.

As we have already pointed out, online status is visible to everyone on WhatsApp, irrespective of whether you have them in your contacts or not. It looks like Chatwatch has managed to exploit this entire system. Of course, it should be pointed out that messages on WhatsApp are all end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read or monitored by any third-party app, which includes even WhatsApp. Only the online/offline status is not hidden.