Researchers extracted photos and statuses from 3.5 billion WhatsApp users. Meta didn’t react until they told him.
Between December 2024 and April 2025, a team from the University of Vienna identified 3.5 billion active phone numbers on WhatsApp (practically its entire user base) from a single server and without encountering too much technical resistance. They processed more than a hundred million numbers per hour and extracted not only the existence of accounts, … Read more