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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t just necessarily a problem with WhatsApp. The same applies to IRC, if you set away states.

Even if you don’t set away states, one can simply monitor every channel you’re in, every message you send, and then quickly determine what timezone you’re in, when you sleep, when you’re on vacation, etc.

Here’s an example graph of a user, every dot is a message: https://i.imgur.com/DrgVvVw.png and here one from a user with more regular sleep patterns: https://i.imgur.com/a1xdSqR.png (notice the timezone transition when daylight savings time starts? And notice how the user takes about 2 weeks to adjust?)

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In chat applications, those features were the first to get disabled. As I recall, one of the MSN Messenger features required you to sign in before you disabled it.

Anyhow, I'd disable showing online status, typing status, or automatically changing status based on activity.

This was a decade and a half ago, probably longer. The principle remains the same. No, no I don't want you to know when I'm in front of my computer, typing, or otherwise. If I want to appear online, I'll manually do so.

Those graphs are determined purely from messages - no away states, nothing

There's no way to disable that.

Reason #32* to avoid the application.

* Entirely made up number.

If you're in a group chat, anyone that is in the same chats can see all your messages in there.

That's the one and simple trick.

Correct, but this doesn't appear to be group chat. This appears to be individual chat and the timing attacks based on their online presence. Group chat, by default, is going to seriously hinder one's ability to remain private.

See also: timestamps when HN comments are posted.

This is much more interesting because pretty much everyone only participates in discussions when posts are on the front page - it would be tough to schedule/delay a post and stay relevant. Also, the lock-in after 1 hour (or a reply) preventing deletion is huge.

Some HN participants are now kind of "whales" in the startup community - at the very least, this info could be used to schedule cold-pitch emails! (And this is across the entire archive of past users, not just current users. These habits need not necessarily change much.)

Timestamp metadata is all over the place - GitHub activity graph, blog post comments, etc. -- merging timestamps for the same person across their accounts on all the different services offers amazing insights.

The only way to "disable" this is to schedule things or provide garbage data (only when user input is given precedence - like with this tool: https://www.laurencegellert.com/software/github-graph-builde...).

Github activity profiles.

Waybackwhen in 1998, when ICQ was a thing, I had an ICQ client on my Amiga that was scriptable. It was fairly trivial to write a quick program to tell it to change status at random times, to confuse people as to my whereabouts.

Yikes, that second person is almost robotic in their sleep patterns.

Actually, most normal working people are similar to the second person.

Only few people have sleep patterns like me (first, erratic graph), and I have them because I spend often my nights working on projects, trying to build new products, and once I've started one, it's hard to stop.

I don't think one of them can be a working person. Both are texting all the time while they're awake.

Both of them are working, and have full jobs. The texts captured included technical support channels, slack-irc bridges, and more.

wow! I find the images creepy and amazing at the same time :)

PS: It's not so much the images themselves but what they mean i.e. this analysis :)

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