WhatsAnalyzer: A Tool for Collecting and Analyzing WhatsApp Mobile Messaging Communication Data

Abstract

WhatsAnalyzer is a web-based service, which collects and analyzes chat histories of the mobile messaging application WhatsApp. Thereby, it leverages the e-mail export feature of WhatsApp to obtain the chat histories, which cannot be accessed otherwise due to encrypted storage on the mobile device and end-to-end encrypted transmission over the Internet. Thus, the major asset of the service is that real communication data can be collected without the bias introduced by observing or surveying participants. The collected communication data can be analyzed and provides valuable insights into the communication in WhatsApp and the resulting network traffic. To incentivize users to send chat histories, the privacy of users is respected by anonymizing all communication data. Moreover, some analyses of each chat history can be accessed on a web page by the sender of the chats.