Researchers from the University of Vienna have quietly compiled a digital directory so vast it contains the personal details of nearly half the global population. The team claims to have scraped the data of 3.5 billion WhatsApp users, effectively creating a shadow database that rivals the platform's own records. If this massive trove of information had fallen into the wrong hands, the team suggests it would, 'to our knowledge, classify as the largest data leak in history, had it not been collated as part of a responsibly-conducted research study.'
While the data was gathered for academic purposes, the implications are unsettling for privacy advocates. The researchers successfully harvested phone numbers, timestamps, 'about' text, profile pictures, and public keys for E2EE encryption. They warn that a public release of this dataset 'would entail adverse implications to the included users.'
