whatsapp-tracking

Proof of concept about tracking contacts in WhatsApp.

• The blog1 branch refers to this blog entry about web scraping exploration.
• The master branch to the second blog entry about mass tracking.

DISCLAIMER: This is a Proof of Concept to raise awareness. Don't use the source code to track someone, don't be a dick.

architecture

The POC is composed of:

• The Node.js WhatsApp scraper robot - Gather the data
• The InfluxDB 2.0 service - Store the data
• The Grafana 6.7 service - Visualize the data

setup

# run the InfluxDB and Grafana services
docker-compose up -d influxdb grafana

influxDB setup

• Go to http://localhost:9999, setup an admin account
  • Name the initial organization like you want, initial-org for instance
  • Name the initial bucket anything, like yolo, we won't use the initial one because there will be sample data in it
• Create a new bucket whatsapp-tracking
• Generate a token whatsapp-tracking-scraper with write permission to whatsapp-tracking bucket
• Generate a token grafana with 'all access'

grafana setup

• Go to http://localhost:3000, setup an admin account
• Add the data source using the plugin Flux (InfluxDB) [BETA] (for InfluxDB 2.0)
  • URL: http://influxdb:9999
  • with credentials: true
  • Organization: initial-org
  • Default Bucket: whatsapp-tracking
  • Token: the grafana token
• Import the dashboard (file grafana-dashboard.json)

scraper setup

Create a file .env in the root directory to setup your environment.

CONTACT_TARGET=YourContactName
INFLUXDB_TOKEN=The whatsapp-tracking-scraper token
INFLUXDB_ORG=initial-org
INFLUXDB_BUCKET=whatsapp-tracking

scraper usage Windows

# init the robot
npm install
# run the robot
node index.js

scraper usage docker

docker-compose up scraper
# Look at `./data/screenshots/` to get the QR code peering.