London: Facebook users will soon be able to track their friends' sleeping habits using only the data available on the social networking giant site.


COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

A software developer, using 'time stamps' taken from Facebook's own Messenger service, has discovered a way to determine the sleeping habits of his 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 engineer Soren Louv-Jansen in a Mail Online report.


He was curious to see where the "last seen" data was coming from and after doing some research, he found a list of his Facebook friends' user IDs and last activity "time stamps".


This, he added, is embedded in the initial mark-up 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.


Louv-Jansen published the programme's source code for his tool on GitHub.


GitHub is used by many developers and hackers to put large amounts of information for developer communities to see and take advantage of, the report said.


(With IANS inputs)