Re:Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
by luckylion on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @09:46AM
(#26889608)
> But.. a company like Facebook should know better. It seems they just don't care.
I agree 100%. If it was a simple hobby project that somebody had hacked together, I'd agree that it might be easily overlooked. When you have thousands of people supposedly working on making privacy a priority etc: not so much.
Re:Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
by throw_away789 on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @09:49AM
(#26889649)
I think its deliberately kept open. There are 100s of apps in play store that can help in predicting if 2 people in your contacts are in conversation.
People like keeping watch on others and Facebook is exploiting that.
When an API always returns the `last_seen` field regardless of who is querying the data, it's very easy to make the mistake to present the data to someone who should not see it.
That's also one of the reasons I think most CRUD APIs use bad practice because they always return all data on a READ and may always store all data on a CREATE or UPDATE.
But.. a company like Facebook should know better. It seems they just don't care.