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Why has WhatsApp accessed my contacts 23,709 times?
- webaholic 11y agoIs there any way to find this out in other versions of Android? I've been experiencing severe battery drain recently and am unable to pinpoint to the app causing it.
- kevindeasis 11y agoYou could reverse engineer it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12732882/reverse-engineering-from-an-apk-file-to-a-project http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12732882/reverse-engineer... I would like to hear from other people about other methods or tools to answer your question. Edit: Sorry, been awake for too long and misread your question. You could use this, but I am not endorsing this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.bbm&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gsamlabs.b...
- hiq 11y agoIf you're willing to use a custom rom, you can see the counts with Cyanogenmod 12.1, based on Android 5.1 (maybe in previous versions too). 17 562 times for me in less than a month.
- drdaeman 11y agoXposed Framework + XPrivacy allows quite granular access controls and history track of those https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy#xprivacy https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy#xprivacy http://i.imgur.com/mZC4RjE.png http://i.imgur.com/mZC4RjE.png (random picture of usage history, found on net)
- privacy101 11y agoGoogle should be required to give root to any user that request it for their own device... (anyone should be able to get better control of their own device). It would be easier to control crazy permissions.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoThey do. It's called the Nexus.
- viewer5 11y agoIs my Nexus 5 pre-rooted? edit: I don't really know a lot about this stuff, I was just trying to understand the comment I was responding to. I think I maybe misunderstand something fundamentally.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoWhy would Google pre-root their phones?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- izacus 11y agoWhy would it have to be? It allows you to enable root access without exploits or trying to prevent you from doing the process.
- simoncion 11y ago> Is my Nexus 5 pre-rooted? No, but Google has made sure that doing so is pretty trivial: https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_hammerhead https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_hammerhead
- StavrosK 11y agoDon't most other phones too? I could unlock the bootloader on my HTC One and my Z3 with just one command.
- privacy101 11y agoI didn't know that they are now letting users root Nexus devices without having to use exploits and such, but I was refering to all devices that use the Android OS.
- sliverstorm 11y agoWithout diving into root, the best method is to use safe mode, and if the battery drain vanishes, start uninstalling everything until the problem goes away. The factory battery report isn't sophisticated enough to correctly attribute blame for more indirect battery usage patterns.
- inDigiNeous 11y agoI was experiencing severe battery drainage also with Cyanogenmod on my old Google Nexus 3. Turns out the culprit was Google services keeping the location service going to sleep. Turned out a newer update of Google Services just does something wrong on unofficial builds. You can see from the preferences which application is keepign the phone awake, but I think you might have to enable the developer options. Solution was hacky, had to install a runtime script which was called on each boot, so that the particular service was blocked. Or maybe it was just looking at the battery stats, not sure anymore.
- anotheryou 11y agoif you got a new contact in your address book you might want to send him the first whatsapp message 30s later, so it better checks for new contacts all the time... If there is no listener for of some kind in the api (android system telling all apps who want to know once there is an update), it will have to ask the system over and over again.
- diggan 11y agoWouldn't it be simpler to just check for new contacts once you open the application?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- valverde 11y agoBecause WhatsApp uses your phone book as the only way to interact with its contact list. You can't add someone to directly to your WhatsApp contact list. It could probably access it less often by only sending deltas, but that would mean their servers would have to store your whole phone book. I don't think that's any better from a privacy perspective. Of course Facebook Messenger doesn't do the same, it has its own contact list coming from Facebook.
- tracker1 11y agoYeah, but roughly every 30 seconds is a bit too much to access... it's one thing to do so while actively using the application... it's another to run these queries all the time, and that is simply ridiculous.
- untog 11y agoSure - but it sounds like programmer error, not the privacy violation that the article makes it out to be.
- aselzer 11y agoWouldn't even call it a programmer error. Someone probably just implemented a getContacts() function that gets called often in the background without saving the data in a local database or caching - and why would you do anything other than this for very marginal performance benefits, a rise in complexity, and possible data sync issues? Another app might access your contacts rarely but store them on their server (Facebook!?). I definitely prefer the previous scenario.
- will_pseudonym 11y agoPlus, I would imagine that the contacts list is going to be the most efficient way to store and retrieve that data. It's in a database, just like anyone else's is, right?
- NegativeK 11y ago
- martinml 11y agoThis seems a bit clickbaity to me. WhatsApp works directly on your contacts, there isn't a remote roster like Facebook Messenger or Telegram. So if any app were to access my contacts 23k times, I'd say WhatsApp is the one app which could justify that.
- joelthelion 11y ago23k means it's polling all the time, not just when you are using it. I think there's no technical justification for this whatsoever.
- SuperKlaus 11y agoDoesn't mean it's sending the address book to their servers 23k times, just that the app needs to resolve phone number --> name.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- martinml 11y agoWe could discuss the technical side, sure. Maybe they can cache the list or create better code to do it more optimally. There might be battery and data usage considerations too, that's true. But this article revolves around the trope of "if it's free you're the product", and altough it might be true, I don't think the 23k thing is a proof of it. That's what I meant with my comment.
- oldmanjay 11y agoIf you don't have any specific knowledge of the details of the implementation, your opinion on the technical justification of a given feature isn't really all that compelling. If you do, you should probably cite it in your comment.
- giaour 11y agoI think a more reasonable explanation is that the author of the article uses WhatsApp more than he realizes. It's possible that WhatsApp is maliciously polling your contact list all the time, but it's more probable that some views access your contact list and the article's author ended up on that screen very often.
- terminado 11y agoQuestion: Is the app traversing the permissions boundary, AND uploading over the network twice a minute? or... Is the app traversing the permissions boundary, and CACHING deltas on the device, for a deferred, less frequent upload of detected differences within a longer time period, perhaps phoning home once every 24 hours, to pass a message that indicates no changes, or only the current diff, OR the complete series of changes, even if there's no net difference, since the last upload? Traversing the permissions boundary can trigger a counter, while traversing the network boundary might be an independent permissions request. It's not clear if the author of the article has insight into these differences. Both scenarios still have the same net effect on privacy, reducing the privacy of the user. The difference here, being a tradeoff in possibly some low-watt brief increases in CPU load, and more expensive network/radio traffic, possibly also affecting mobile data/bandwidth caps.
- SapphireSun 11y agoI don't really understand how the privacy implications of the 23,000th access are much different from the 1st except for grabbing the info of new contacts. If you gave them permission to grab it from time to time, any access rate above once a year is about the same.
- OJFord 11y agoCompletely agree. The access at the point when your directory is at it's maximum (or multiple if you remove some) is just as intrusive as itself and a million others. And it's WhatsApp ffs, if you're concerned about it having your contacts what on Earth are you doing with it.
- bitmapbrother 11y agoThis number seems extremely suspicious and artificially high. It's almost as if the BB DTEC application has no idea what data it's diagnosing. Given their dubious claims regarding the implementation of grSecurity I'm inclined to not believe these findings.
- SuperKlaus 11y agoI turned off "Contacts" permission for Whatsapp to see what happens and immediately all new messages show up with numbers only, no names so it looks like contacts are used for number to name resolution and not necessarily uploaded to their servers.
- morganvachon 11y agoAnd since it immediately switched them to numbers-only, it's not caching, which explains why it polls so much. It's likely they didn't want any sort of delay when opening the app, so they found a way to poll regularly without impacting battery life significantly. Sounds pretty straightforward to me, if that's the case.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jgalt212 11y agoThere's only really a story here if WhatsApp's access rate your contact list demonstrably different pre and post the Facebook acquisition.
- hackaflocka 11y agoBecause Facebook.
- jc4p 11y agoLike others said, it's most likely using the phone's contacts as its primary data source (which makes sense, you're encouraged to do this on Android so you don't have segmented contacts in every app) -- This definitely reads like a clickbait article from someone who has just enough rope to hang themselves. The author's validity comes into question with how alarming the tone of this post is, and how he gave the company a week to respond to a non-important question then flamed them for not responding. His article on the Priv titled "BlackBerry Priv review: One of the best Android handsets I’ve ever used" vs Ars's post[0] on the same model from one of the more respected Android writers which is titled "BlackBerry Priv review: Android fixes the OS, but the hardware can’t compete" tells me all I need to know about this. [0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/blackberry-priv-review-android-fixes-the-os-but-the-hardware-cant-compete/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/blackberry-priv-revie...
- forgetsusername 11y ago>The author's validity comes into question with how alarming the tone of this post is What, exactly, is so alarming about the tone? I'd also be curious as to why an app is accessing my contacts so often. There might even be valid battery-life concerns. >and how he gave the company a week to respond to a non-important question It's important to the customer. I guess this is lost on the SV people who no longer believe that people from the company selling you a service should actually be accessible. But there was a time when if you had a question, like "why is your product using so many of my phone's resources?" you could have it answered. A week certainly isn't unreasonable, especially for a journalist. >tells me all I need to know about this. Disagree with review; dismiss article? Do you think there's some kind of agenda?
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoI think the OP was insinuating that the writer is not technically competent enough to be authoritatively evaluating technology to such a degree.
- oldmanjay 11y agoThe article's tone isn't alarming, but I'd guess the OP meant alarmist, which kind of fits. The author's argument certainly doesn't present a clear path from the inciting incident to any of the conclusions, so I also feel comfortable dismissing it. There isn't much use for emotional persuasive writing about technological issues outside of handwringing, and handwringing is boring to many of us.
- gregcrv 11y agoBut I remember paying for WhatsApp like $1/year, is it free now ?
- koenigdavidmj 11y agoFree for the first year.
- purans 11y agoBecause it's owned by facebook :) I am sure they need to know your contact to serve you ads!
- DominikR 11y agoThe author of the article has every right to know what some company is doing with the private information of the customer, but this doesn't mean he is entitled to being explained the (technical) inner workings of the application. If Whatsapp was a bad citizen in respect to battery life I would at least understand why he is asking, but this is not the case. What I am sure of: Whatsapp maps E.164 normalized telephone numbers from your contact list to every contact in the phones address book. The app probably queries you phones contact database just like the standard phone or SMS app would do for every bit of information it shows.
- teen 11y agoWhat a dumb article. That's like complaining your Caller app has accessed your Contacts list too many times.
- igorgue 11y agoWhy dumb? I think the dumb one is you, see, 23K times, every 2 minutes access, in what mind is that reasonable? Do you add somebody new to the contacts ever 2 minutes?
- hoare 11y agoWould be an intetesting article if network traffic would`ve been tracked. The difference between accessing the contact list in a 30sec intervall vs additonally sending the gathered information to their servers is a huge difference. Be it power consumption or traffic wise. Maybe its a mechanism to prevent stand by mode? I made the experience that, if i turn on power save mode i only recieve messages if i actively open whatsapp.
- rasz_pl 11y agothenextweb.com keeps auto scrolling up, and served me fullscreen javascript popup, quality place.
- lucb1e 11y agoNot quite sure what the difference is between 1 access and 23 709 accesses.
- cwilkes 11y agoSpeculating here: by polling this often they will know exactly when you added a contact. Because they are owned by Facebook they can then message back saying that these two people are connected and then maybe show better ads. They can also use it as a gauge to see how their advertising for whatsapp gets used.
- will_pseudonym 11y agoIn an alternate universe: "Why isn't WhatsApp refreshing my contact list? I updated the contact 30 seconds ago!"
- kevindeasis 11y agoI actually have this problem. It's very annoying and the main reason why I try to avoid whatsapp for talking to new contacts.
- jo909 11y agoPrivacy wise it makes no difference if they read your contacts once a day or once a minute. If the want, they have your contacts either way. Actually this is a hint that they actually might not store your contacts names, pictures, addresses etc in their own app, but only retrieve that information to display it. The way their web client works (it communicates with the smartphone app, not with the whatsapp servers) is another hint that they might not even store your full contacts on their own servers.
- OJFord 11y agoThis is stupid. Why am I more concerned about my privacy if WhatsApp reads my contacts 23,709 times in 7 days, or just once? It's still got the same data from me. It does seem excessive; perhaps sub-optimal or even an accidental bug. But certainly nothing for the media to freak out about.. Author's fear mongering is unwarranted.