More than 60% of my contacts set their profile pictures as public. “ Profile picture as public” This is the most important factor in this research project. We can only see somebody’s profile picture if: We are not allowed to see everybody’s profile picture on WhatsApp. Finally I imported them into my emulator which took over 30 minutes. I used an English name directory to generate real full names. Each contact had a surname and family name - the names I generated weren’t dummy data. From these 70,000 phone numbers I created 70,000 contacts (in the VCF format). I didn’t generate them in an ascending order because WhatsApp could detect it and block me.

I generated 70,000 random cell phone numbers. Then I installed WhatsApp on the emulator. Creating Contact Listįirstly I installed the Android emulator NoxPlayer on my PC. Face recognition software - I was sponsored by. A tool to download profile pictures from WhatsApp - I developed my ownħ. A tool to generate cell phone numbers - I developed my ownĥ. A phone number to create a new WhatsApp account - I bought one (can be blocked by WhatsApp)Ĥ. WhatsApp’s APK file - (i used WhatsApp Business)ģ.

I found people’s phone numbers, friends, relatives and social network profiles by just using their pictures.ġ. Could I identify and find a person and his friends or relatives just by taking his picture?

You can get more information about this project here.Ī few months ago I started to analyse WhatsApp to find an answer to a similar question to the one above. We tested it on 158 people and determined that it’s partially possible. We used LinkedIn, Xing, and Facebook as sources and tried to find the target person’s social network accounts on these social networks.

In the context of this project we tried to find out whether it’s possible to identify people in the street by taking their picture or entering their name. Two years ago I developed a project with my professor Norbert Pohlmann which we named SocielIdent. WhatsIdent: How I identified people by using WhatsApp profile pictures

Whatsapp number search