Beiruting News

Even if you have enabled strict privacy controls on WhatsApp, you can still be tracked. A Dutch university student has developed a simple web-based tool that can be used to track WhatsApp users.

WhatsSpy Public, the open-source tool, can retrieve anything like the user's profile photos and status messages. It can also retrieve the user's timeline to show when he or she was actually online.

"This is not a hack or an exploit of WhatsApp's systems, but a result of the way it was designed. The app offers three privacy settings: Last Seen, Profile Photo and Status. Users can choose whether each of these can be seen by everyone, only by his or her contacts, or by no one. The Last Seen setting does not prevent users from seeing that other users are online, although it seems to imply that,"  said Maikel Zweerink, who has developed the tool.

However, there is no tracking of actual messages but the tool is a rough proof-of-concept that displays a timeline of a user.

There is no tracking down of actual messages and no way to know if or when and what messages are being exchanged.

The app, WhatsSpy Public, is freely available and can be downloaded and installed on a web server. You just need a SIM card that you have put in use on WhatsApp, a rooted Android device or jail broken iPhone, and internet access for tracking.