How ChatWatch works

The signal: presence, not messages

When you open a chat in WhatsApp, the app tells you whether that person is online right now and, if their settings allow, when they were last seen. That information is a presence signal WhatsApp sends to your account for each contact. It is the only thing ChatWatch uses.

Messages, calls, media and chat lists travel separately and are end-to-end encrypted. ChatWatch never subscribes to them and never asks for chat history. If a page claims to show you someone's WhatsApp messages from the outside, it is describing spyware on their phone or describing nothing real.

Set-up in three steps

1. 01Log in with your WhatsApp number. No email, no password to invent: your number is your account.
2. 02Link your WhatsApp as an extra device. WhatsApp shows you a short code; type it into Linked devices on your phone, or scan the QR code. This is the same mechanism WhatsApp Web and WhatsApp Desktop use, and it appears in your phone's Linked devices list where you can remove it at any time.
3. 03Add the numbers you want to track, by typing them or picking them from your contacts list. Recording starts the moment you add a contact and continues on our servers, 24 hours a day, whether or not your browser is open.

What happens after that

Every time a tracked contact comes online or goes offline, ChatWatch stores the event with its timestamp. Those events become Online History (the full timeline), Last Seen (the sequence of most-recent connections), NightWatch (the night hours over the last 10 days) and Chat Probability (how often two contacts' activity coincides). Nothing is computed on your phone; you open the dashboard and read the results.

Activity records are kept for 12 months and then deleted, or earlier if you remove the contact or close your account.

What the other person experiences

Nothing. ChatWatch does not contact them, does not install anything on their phone, does not send read receipts, and does not appear in their app. It records what WhatsApp already shows your account about them, which they control with their own privacy settings.

Where the limits are

These limits are structural, not features we chose to leave out. Anyone promising to get around them is not being straight with you.

• If a contact hides their last seen or online status from you, WhatsApp sends nothing, and ChatWatch has nothing to record.
• If you unlink ChatWatch from your phone, or WhatsApp logs the device out, recording pauses until you link again.
• ChatWatch cannot see the past: history starts when you add a contact.
• Presence means the app was open, not what the person was doing in it. Chat Probability is a statistical estimate, not proof.

Security and your account

Linking ChatWatch as a device gives it a session on your WhatsApp account, like WhatsApp Web. We store the credentials that keep that session alive, encrypted, and use them only to receive presence updates. We never send messages, change settings or read anything on your behalf. You can revoke the session from your phone at any moment under Linked devices, and everything we hold about the link is deleted when you unlink.