There’s this video that has been making rounds on Kenyan Twitter since last week. Watch it.
While that is good and all, unless one is very detached from the happenings on their device, it is not possible that they will be snooped upon by their significant other or any other party for that matter, without their knowledge.
This is because back in May last year, WhatsApp introduced a new persistent notification meant to keep the connection between the web client and the mobile app active.
For security and privacy purposes, WhatsApp Web works by mirroring content on one’s smartphone on a secondary device’s web browser. The secondary device can be a personal computer as most people are likely to use it on or even another mobile device like as is the case in the above video.
Whichever the case, the primary mobile device where WhatsApp is being mirrored from gets a persistent notification that actively informs the user that there is an active WhatsApp Web session. While it is possible to just swipe the notification away, it swings back into action anytime there is activity in the open WhatsApp Web window.
Therefore, it is practically impossible that this will go on for a while without anyone noticing. Of course, just as is the case with anything tech-related, never say never. There are Xposed framework modules that do away with such notifications but that’s a stretch and there’s no guarantee that they work 100% (hint: they don’t). They are also unlikely to be what a random girl resorts to in order to corner her philandering man. The very savvy ones have better ways to do so.
So, no need for alarm, Android n****s.
Thanks, Duncan Kimutai for pointing this out.