You can now track people’s sleeping habits with Facebook Messenger

The social networking website Facebook can be used to track people’s sleeping habits by building up a database of when your friends were seen last online on facebook.

A Danish software developer has released the programme’s source code for his tool on GitHub, which can be used as a proxy for sleeping habits that anyone can use to track their friends.

“Many people visit Facebook as the first thing in the morning and the last thing before going to bed. It is, therefore, possible to get a good impression of their sleeping habits,” said San Francisco-based software developer Soren Louv-Jansen in a Mail Online report.

The software developer Soren Louv-Jansen, using ‘time stamps’ taken from Facebook’s own Messenger service, has discovered a way to determine the sleeping habits of his friends.

This is embedded in the initial markup of Messenger.com and can be viewed by simply visiting the website and clicking “View Source” to see for yourself. “By creating a simple service that checks Facebook every 10 minutes, I’m able to get an accurate picture of my friends’ Facebook usage,” said Louv-Jansen.

Soren Louv-Jansen writes on Medium that snippets of code on Messenger.com reveal when a user in his network was the last active. a list of user ids and timestamps of last activity

“lastActiveTimes”: {
 “3443534”: 1456065265,
 “675631492”: 1456066386,
 “8657643”: 1456062331,
 “255277634”: 1456052450,
 “6423324”: 1456065173,
 “235323452”: 1456065096,
 “3265233223”: 1456066381,
 “2432885644”: 1456064016,
 “7464340313”: 1456062500
}

The above can be loosely translated to:
— Peter was the last active on Feb 21, 2016, 15:34:25.
— John Doe was the last active on Feb 21, 2016, 17:15:11.
— Elizabeth was the last active on Feb 21, 2016, 10:09:55.
…and so forth