WhatsApp

How to send a fake or nearby location on WhatsApp

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Let’s explain to you how to send a fake location in WhatsApp. With this, you can meet someone without revealing where you live exactly, simply doing it somewhere close. You will also be able to send it a place with another context, such as an area where you want to travel or something similar. We are going to tell you three things you can do. You can do the first two on Android and on the iPhone, also on WhatsApp Web and on the desktop, and is to send nearby locations or directly any other custom location you want. Then we will tell you another trick to be able to fake your own location if you use an Android mobile. Send a nearby fixed location To send a nearby fixed location, the first thing you have to do is enter the chat with the person you want to send it to. Then, click on the add element button, which on Android has a paperclip icon and on the iPhone a +. In the menu that opens, Click on the location option that will appear to you. This will open a screen with the map. In it, above you have the map with your location and nearby location pointsand below you have the list of nearby locations. Here, you just have to Click on the nearby location you want and you will send it. Send a custom fixed location To send a personalized location, the first thing you have to do is enter the chat with the person you want to send it to. Then, click on the add element button, which on Android has a paperclip icon and on the iPhone a +. In the menu that opens, Click on the location option that will appear to you. This will open a screen with the map. In it, Write the location you want in the search enginewhether close or not. The results will appear both on the map and in the list, and you will only have to click on the location you want. You can also navigate the map without using the search engine, and thus find a fixed location that you want. When you find it, click on it and you can share it. This gives you complete flexibility to share any location. Use a GPS app to send fake locations On Android you have alternatives to send totally fake locations without them having to be close to you. For that, first you have to download an app to fake your GPSas Fake GPS. Find it and install it on your mobile. Now, you have to activate Android developer optionsentering About my phone in the settings and clicking ten times on the build number. Within the options for developers, go to the bottom and click on the option Choose app to simulate locationand you will enter a screen where you can choose the Fake GPS that you just installed. Now, open the Fake GPS application and choose the location you want to pretend you are in. To do this, you have to put the pin in the place you want, and then click on the play button at the bottom right. Now, with the steps that we have told you before, enter the chat you want, and click on the option to send location. By doing so, simply press the button Send my current location. If you’ve done everything right, The location you send will be the one you have activated in Fake GPS instead of your real one. In Xataka Basics | How to know if they are spying on your WhatsApp using WhatsApp Web

Just Eat knows that we Spaniards are hooked on Delivery. This is how they have closed an agreement so that you can order on WhatsApp

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Spain it is delivery countryand Just Eat knows it. We are one of the European markets where food delivery has grown the most in the last decade. So much so, Just Eat has decided to make Spain one of the only two countries—along with the Netherlands—where it will debut in Europe something that no delivery platform had done before: allowing you to order food directly from WhatsApp. The alliance. Just Eat has become the first platform in Europe to enable an integrated ordering experience through WhatsApp in which the entire search and selection process occurs within the chat itself. The Just Eat app only comes into play for the last step: secure payment. WhatsApp is not going to replace the service app, but rather it is going to become one of the main entry channels. “With the launch of the first ordering system via WhatsApp in Europe, at Just Eat we are not just including a new channel: we are redefining the concept of convenience. This innovation is a key element in our evolution, going from being a menu-based transactional application to becoming a true intelligent assistant powered by AI, capable of understanding user intent in real time.” Mert Öztekin, CTO of Just Eat How it will work. Using a QR code or link, we will enter WhatsApp, we will start a conversation with the AI agent from Just Eat, and we can complete practically the entire experience from the messaging app. Unlike the existing WhatsApp chat options, aimed at customer assistance channels, the company ensures that its AI will be able to understand natural language, to talk with us about what we want to eat, what restaurants there are, what they have on the menu and their prices. The promise is clear: this is not a support chatbot or anything similar to what we have used so far. The buts. The proposal is striking, but it is inevitable to ask some questions. The first is a simple “why”. Explaining to an AI agent what you want for dinner when Just Eat has a highly optimized app in which you can order food in five or six touches of the screen, a priori, does not seem more comfortable. The second is that Goal is Goaland every WhatsApp conversation goes through its servers. That Just Eat has the necessary data for our order is logical, but all this information Now passing through Meta may not be so attractive. When. Just Eat has not given a final date for this service, although it assures that it will begin its trial in 2026. They will start in Spain and the Netherlands and, if it is a success, expand to more countries in the European Union. In Xataka | The delivery war is no longer about bringing pizzas home, it is about delivering in 10 minutes: ‘Q-commerce’

How to create a pack of Chibi stickers from your photo with Gemini or ChatGPT and then use them on WhatsApp or wherever you want

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Let’s explain to you how to create a “Chibi” style sticker packthat Japanese style in which a face is caricatured with a big, adorable head. Let’s do this using artificial intelligenceand a prompt that you will be able to use both Gemini as in ChatGPT. Once you have generated your sticker packall you have to do is cut out each one of the image and use it as you want. For example, you can use the methods we have told you to convert any image into sticker directly on WhatsApp. The positive part of the prompt that we are going to tell you is that it will make you a series of stickers defined with pre-established expressions that you will be able to edit together with the prompt. And although it was created by OpenAI for ChatGPT, you can use it by hand both in this and in any other AI that generates images, such as ChatGPT. Create a sticker pack from your photo To create a sticker pack from your photo, you first have to upload a photo in which your face can be seen well and your features. If it’s a selfie, better, because then the AI ​​can use your features to compose the pack. Once you have attached your photo to the ChatGPT and Gemini writing field, write the following prompt. You have to send both things at the same time, the photograph and the prompt. The command to use is the following: Using the uploaded photo, create a pack of adorable, illustrated chibi stickers. Clean white background, vertical format with a thick white border. Create various tender expressions: laughing, crying, sleepy, surprised, confused, eating, grumpy, cute expressions… Each expression must include a tender text, for example: Good morning! Whatee? / Huh? / I remind you! / What a dream / Wow! Approved! / Brilliant! / Hey, you! Achís! / Angry! / Huh??? / Good night :3 / Too cute / Am I cool now?! Once you send the image along with the prompt, AI will create a set of stickers from your photograph, and it will put them all into a single image. Now all you have to do is digitally cut out each one and use it to generate your sticker for your messaging app. In Xataka Basics | How to create a character in ChatGPT and Gemini to use it in all the images you make with artificial intelligence

We have turned WhatsApp into an “emotional pacifier”. And science warns that it is making us more fragile

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A message sent, a double check blue and, suddenly, silence. In that period of time, which can last minutes or days, the stomach shrinks. The immediate reaction for many is instinctive: unlock the screen of the smartphoneimmersing yourself in social media, sending looping messages seeking solace. We have turned our devices into an “emotional pacifier” to calm the anxiety of “not knowing.” In an era where hyperconnection promises us instant answers, science and psychology issue a clear warning: our inability to tolerate uncertainty is making us increasingly fragile. The brain in the face of chaos. To understand what happens to us, we have to look at our biology. As psychologist Regina López Riego explainsour brain is evolutionarily designed to look for patterns and make sense of everything around us. “This was key to our survival as a species: identifying threats and anticipating dangers,” he says. However, in today’s world, that need for certainty translates into constant suffering. The problem is that we live in a universe governed by entropy. From the team of Nalu Psychology remember thatbased on chaos theory and thermodynamics, systems tend toward disorder. “The future is uncertain and, one way or another, we deal with it as best we can,” they explain. When changes threaten, fear takes center stage, alerting us to possible danger. To mitigate that fear, we resort to a patch: control. However, it is a trap. The brain processes the symptoms of anxiety in the same way that it relates to uncertainty, releasing large amounts of norepinephrine that affect our nervous system. The more we try to tie down the future, the more discomfort we generate. The trap of overthinking. When the mind has no data, it invents it. The psychologist Marta Valle In his blog he explains that overthinking not as a lack of intelligence, but as a failed protection mechanism born of fear of error and low tolerance for uncertainty. It manifests itself in two ways: ruminating on the past or worrying in anticipation about the future. “You think that if you think about it enough, you will avoid a problem,” he details, but the end result is paralysis, insomnia and disconnection from the present. Experts from Harvard Mental Health Services (CAMHS) They have a name for this phenomenon: “toxic time travel.” Dr. Rue Wilson, a psychologist at this institution, describes how we try to feel in control by imagining different outcomes. “We get stuck ruminating, overwhelmed by ‘what ifs,’ and disconnected from the present, which is where we really have the most certainty.” Feed a bigger monster. This loop ends in what psychologist Laura Marín defines as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)where concern is constant and fueled by overestimating the risks. Marín illustrates this with a clear example: two women, Alicia and Brenda, undergo a medical test. While Alicia asks whatever is necessary and continues with her daily life, Brenda compulsively searches for information on the Internet and needs her partner to continually reassure her. It is the so-called “reinsurance search”. Checking emails, postponing decisions or constantly asking for opinions are strategies that give false relief in the short term, but in the long run make us unable to tolerate the slightest doubt. The cell phone as an escape route. The need to escape from uncertainty has found in smartphones your best ally, but at a high cost for mental health. Rigorous research supports this claim. In a couple of published studies in the scientific journal Science Direct (led by Jon D. Elhai and colleagues in 2017), it was demonstrated through systematic reviews that the severity of depression and anxiety are strongly linked to problematic mobile phone use. One of the most revealing findings of Elhai’s research differentiates between “social” use of the phone (messaging, networks) and “process” use (consumption of news, entertainment, scroll passive). The study found that anxiety is much more related to process use than social use. That is, people with anxiety use the non-social functions of their devices as an avoidance mechanism (such as doomscrolling or addictive consumption of news) to avoid facing stress, this “use of process” being the direct bridge to mobile addiction. In fact, Dr. Leigh W. Jerome warns precisely about this habit. In the face of global chaos, doomscrolling It does not prepare us for the future, but “can cause headaches, muscle tension, high blood pressure, and difficulty sleeping.” Leon Garber, mental health counselor, adds a vital reflection on compulsive doubt avoidance: “Avoidance, in and of itself, is not negative (…) but imagine how many missed opportunities for growth or connection, over time, add up to a lost relationship.” Garber points out that even therapy has a limit if the patient is only seeking definitive answers. “We have to learn to live with uncertainty. Fundamentally, we have to learn to live,” he says. The trap of the hyperconnected world. The desire for certainties not only affects the individual, but shapes our society. An analysis published in The Conversation reminds us thatAccording to Maslow’s pyramid, security is a primary need. However, the obsession with eliminating all risks has a dark side. “There are desires that should not be fulfilled and that of radical security is a desire that can never and should never be satisfied,” the article underlines. Trying to control everything, whether through algorithms, surveillance cameras or the transfer of freedoms, strips us of our humanity and leads us to voluntary servitude. Instead of delegating control to technology to avoid panic, experts advocate a “pedagogy of responsibility”, appealing to the values ​​of Kant and Rousseau, where we assume that zero risk does not exist. How to inhabit the void. Since uncertainty is inevitable, the solution is not to find all the answers, but to change our relationship with the questions. According to institutions such as Harvard CAMHS and diverse psychology professionalsthere are four keys to navigate the uncontrollable: Focus on what you control: challenge the illusion of absolute certainty. If you lose your job, you can’t control when you’ll be hired, but you … Read more

Netherlands warns of Russian cyberattacks against Signal and WhatsApp around the world: they don’t need malware

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When we think about applications like Signal or WhatsApp we usually immediately associate them with the idea of ​​privacy. Both have been built on a very clear promise: end to end encryption prevents third parties, including the companies themselves, from reading users’ messages. This security model has made millions of people trust these platforms for personal, professional and even sensitive conversations. However, that protection does not mean that accounts are completely safe. The intelligence services of the Netherlands have warned now of a global campaign that seeks to compromise accounts of these unused applications malware nor exploit technical flaws. The objectives. The military intelligence service (MIVD) and the general intelligence and security service (AIVD) indicate that the attacks seek to access accounts belonging to dignitaries, public officials and military personnel. Authorities also acknowledge that Dutch Government employees have been both targets and victims of these attempts. In addition, the report indicates that other profiles that may be of interest to the Russian Government, such as journalists, could also be among the recipients of this type of attack. Social engineering instead of spyware. Unlike other episodes of digital espionage that have affected messaging services in the past, the campaign described by the Dutch services does not rely on malware or the exploitation of technical flaws. The report explains that attackers mainly resort to phishing and social engineering techniques to gain access to accounts. This difference is relevant when compared to tools such as Pegasusthe famous spyware capable of infiltrating mobile phones. In this case, the goal is not to compromise the phone system, but rather to take advantage of the user’s behavior to take control of their account or link a foreign device. “Account take-over”. One of the methods is direct takeover of the account. The attackers, they explain in the report, pose as the official support team of the application and send messages to the victim alerting them of alleged suspicious activities, possible data leaks or attempts to access their account. From there they request that the user complete a verification process and share the code they receive by SMS, as well as the PIN configured in the application. If the victim provides this data, the malicious actor can take control of the account and reassociate it with a number under their control. The trick of QR and linked devices. The report also describes a second access route that does not necessarily imply that the victim loses immediate control of their account. In this case, attackers use social engineering techniques to convince the user to scan a QR code or click on a seemingly legitimate link, for example under the guise of joining a chat group. That QR or link may be designed to link the attacker’s device to the victim’s account using the apps’ linked device features. Once connected, the attacker can access the conversations and, depending on the platform and access mode, see messages in progress or even part of the history, in addition to being able to send messages on behalf of the user. What the intelligence services recommend. The report also includes several practical recommendations to reduce the risk of these types of attacks. Authorities warn that you should never share verification codes or your account PIN through messages, even if the request appears to come from the app’s support service. They also recommend distrusting links or QR codes sent by unknown contacts and always verify these requests through another channel before interacting with them. Another important measure is to periodically review the list of devices linked to the account and remove any devices that are not recognized. The document also adds other useful measures, such as activating the registration block in Signal and notifying contacts by another means if there is a suspicion that the account has been compromised. Images | BoliviaIntelligent | Also AY In Xataka | That they can hack a mobile phone just by entering a website is scary. If that mobile phone is also an iPhone, it’s terrifying

How to create sticker with any word in WhatsApp

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Let’s explain to you how to create a sticker with any word in WhatsApp. The messaging application has been promoting this way of speaking through images and memes for some time, and just as you can now create stickers from any photoyou can also do it with any word. No, it is not an option for create stickers with artificial intelligencebut a function within the sticker search engine. In it, you just have to search for a word and a sticker will automatically be generated with it. We are going to tell you how to do it step by step. Make a sticker of any word The first thing you have to do is enter any WhatsApp chat. Once inside, when you open the keyboard Click on the stickers buttonwhich will appear to the right of the text field where you write your messages. This will take you to the screen for sending GIFs and stickers, where you have to click on the sticker tab. Once inside, you will see your favorite and suggested stickers. On this screen, click on the search button which you will see at the top left with the magnifying glass icon. Once you are in the search for stickers section, simply write the word or phrase you want as if you were going to look for it. You will see that a sticker will be generated with it with five different predefined designs. These designs will work for any word you are looking for, and with which you will generate your sticker. In Xataka Basics | Member labels in WhatsApp: what they are and how to use them to organize the members of a group

In 2013, WhatsApp cost almost one euro. And nothing prevents Meta from charging for the app again in 2026

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There was a time when WhatsApp was paid. This was more than ten years ago, before Goal was done with the application and ended up completely changing its structure over time. The latest beta of the app leaks something that seemed inevitable after the arrival of the announcements: a paid subscription to avoid them. He leak. WhatsApp has two versions, the stable and the beta. It is common for the code of the next beta versions to be leaked, giving us a preview of the functions that will end up reaching the final app. And the latest leak points in a very specific direction. Since you recently removed your WhatsApp account from your Accounts Center, the price of your subscription for no ads in Status & Channels has decreased. Review your subscription to accept the new price of %1$s/month; or choose to use Status & Channels free of charge with ads. Additionally, Android Authority has managed to force the code so that the app displays a message in its interface about the possibility of canceling the subscription. WHATSAPP Tricks and tips to HIDE YOURSELF TO THE MAXIMUM and maintain your PRIVACY A plausible hypothesis. So far, practically all the WhatsApp code leaks have ended up materializing: either as functions tested in the beta version, or as features that have ended up reaching the final version. One of them has been the introduction of advertising in the app, which for now is limited to statuses, promotional channels and channel subscriptions. In the case of states, the operation is very similar to what Meta applies on Instagram, interspersing ads every certain number of publications. So… what if I don’t want ads? What do you give me in exchange?. If Meta wants to implement a subscription system with any modicum of success, it will have to offer more than just removing ads in return. The subscription opens the door to new WhatsApp functions, and a business model similar to that of Telegram with its premium version. One in which the app can continue to be used without any inconvenience in the free version, but which opens the door to benefits and a better experience if we check out. Because. If the question is why Meta may intend to charge you for WhatsApp, the answer is very easy: it needs money. In 2014, Facebook paid nearly $1 billion for WhatsApp. Almost 10 years later, He had barely recovered 10% of what he paid for it.. The company continues to need ways to make the investment profitable, and betting on a subscription model is a necessary plan. Image | Xataka Mobile In Xataka | WhatsApp Web: What it is, how it is used and comparison with the mobile app

The emoji is now the only safe passage so that a “voucher” does not seem hostile on WhatsApp

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At some point, without anyone deciding, It is no longer acceptable to send a dry message in a WhatsApp group. “Ok” became hostile, “okay” became sharp and a simple “understood” was almost a declaration of someone seeking war. So we learned to quilt: To put the “👍” after the “ok”. The “😊” after a request. The “hahaha” before an opinion that could upset. Not because we felt laughter, approval or tenderness. But because the message without emoji is the message that must be interpreted. And in a culture like Spain, interpreting is dangerous. The emoji has become mandatory emotional punctuation. It doesn’t convey what you feel, but yespoint out what you don’t want the other to suspect. The “😂” rarely means that you found something funny. It means: this is a joke, don’t take it the wrong way, I’m not being rude, I’m still being nice. It is a safe conduct. A social insurance policy. Same with the “hahaha.” No one laughs when writing it, it’s just a tone marker, a way of saying: relax, this isn’t serious, we’re still friends. The more jots, the more eager the attempt to smooth out. “Ha” is dry. “Haha” is minimally polite. “Hahaha” is cordial. “Hahahaha” is nervous. “HAHAHAHA” is desperate. We have built a parallel language to avoid the conflict that never comes. Because there is almost never real conflict. Only the fear that there is. And that fear has inflated every message until it becomes a dance of false preventive emotions. The result is a hollowed-out language. When everything has emoji, none of them mean anything. When everything ends in “hahaha”, the laughter disappears. When all messages are warm, warmth becomes background noise. But we can’t stop. Because the first one to stop putting the “😊” will be the edge. The weird one. The one who “always answers dryly.” In the whatsapp groups Spaniards, cordiality is mandatory. And what is obligatory, by definition, is not cordial. It’s a perfect trap: To show that you are not hostile, you have to overact kindness. And when everyone overreacts, it is no longer possible to distinguish who is really nice from who is simply following the protocol. The emoji, which was born to add emotion to the text, has ended up anesthetizing it. Perhaps the clearest symptom is the “❤️”. A heart. The symbol of love, of deep affection. Today we sent it to confirm that we received a PDF. We use it to close a conversation without having to actually respond. It has become what “sincerely” was to the letters of yesteryear: a closing formula that means absolutely nothing. As the impersonal ‘Merry Christmas’ that any company sends you by email. In a few years, someone will study the WhatsApp groups of this era and believe that we lived in a society of overflowing affection. Emojis everywhere. Constant laughter. Hearts all the time. You won’t know it was the opposite. That we inflated words precisely because we no longer trusted them. That we filled the messages with emotion because we had stopped feeling it. And that “hahaha”, in the end, was our way of saying: I don’t know what to tell you, but I’m still here. Ha ha ha. Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio In Xataka | AI is transforming the relationship we have with our own ideas: we no longer create, we just “edit” ourselves

Researchers extracted photos and statuses from 3.5 billion WhatsApp users. Meta didn’t react until they told him.

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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, but also public keys, profile photos, status texts, and device metadata. They did it without having to hide, from the same university IP, same server, five accounts. For four months, no one in Meta noticed. Why is it important. This is not the first time that this vulnerability has been demonstrated, as it has already occurred in 2012 and 2021but the first at this scale and speed. The finding exposes a structural contradiction in WhatsApp: Your architecture should show whether a number is registered to enable contact discovery… …but that functional need collides with the privacy of its users. Knowing who uses WhatsApp in countries where it is prohibited, such as China, Burma or North Korea, can have serious consequences. There they detected 2.3 million, 1.6 million and five accounts respectively (not five million, just five). The investigation, published a few weeks ago in NDSS 2026shows that this crack not only persists, but has widened. The context. The researchers developed ‘libphonegen’, a tool that reduces the search space from billions of theoretical combinations of possible mobile phone numbers to “just” 63 billion real candidates for 245 countries. Using unofficial WhatsApp clients that directly access the XMPP API, they queried these numbers at a rate of 7,000 per second. Neither his IP was blocked nor his accounts sanctioned. Meta did not respond until researchers explicitly reported the finding in March of this year, and countermeasures did not arrive until October, just a couple of months ago. The figures. He dataset resulting five times higher the scandal of scraping from Facebook 2021: India leads the document with 749 million users (21% of the total), followed by Indonesia and Brazil. In Spain, 46.5 million accounts. 81% use Android. More than half have a public profile photo. 29% have the status text visible. Between the lines. The researchers were able to infer the operating system by analyzing initialization patterns of the cryptographic keys. Android starts certain identifiers at zero. iOS does this in random values. This detail matters because iPhone users are higher-value targets for attackers. They also detected that public keys are reused. They found 2.3 million different keys used on 2.9 million different devices. In Burma and Nigeria, tens of thousands of numbers shared the same key, pointing either to faulty implementation or outright fraud. They even found twenty American numbers that use a private key composed only of zeros. In detail. The method is not limited to confirming the existence of the accounts. For each one they extracted public keys, timestamps and the list of linked devices. This allows you to build detailed profiles without accessing the content of the messages. The age of the device can be estimated by counting key rotations. The “popularity” of a user is inferred by the frequency of depletion of their prekeys single usewhich are consumed every time you start a new conversation. Researchers downloaded 77 million profile photos of the +1 rank (prefix for the United States and Canada) in a matter of hours. 66% of them contained recognizable faces. They also found disturbing status texts, such as those from traffickers listing prices, accounts business advertising drugs or publicly visible corporate emails from governments and armies. And now what. Meta has deployed probabilistic cardinality counters to limit how many unique accounts a user can query without blocking legitimate contact discovery. It has also restricted bulk access to status photos and texts. The researchers confirmed that the measures work in subsequent tests. But no countermeasures protect those who were already listed during the months in which the system has been wide open. The big question. For four months, from a university server without even hiding their identity, they looted practically the entire user base of the most used application on the planet without anyone at Meta realizing until they were explicitly told. If these researchers were able to do it under these conditions, who else did it before without telling anyone? In Xataka | WhatsApp brings the big update of the season: the most important change is not on the mobile, but on the computer Featured image | Dimitri Karastelev

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