WhatsApp accused of retaining ‘deleted’ chats
Privacy standards at Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp have been called into question by researchers who have discovered that the app routinely retains chats even after they’ve supposedly been deleted.
The discovery was made by iOS researcher Jonathan Zdziarski who found that chat logs remain present on disc unless overwritten, meaning that anyone with physical access to the device could potentially retrieve the data or access it via a remote back-up system.
Zdziarski attributed this loophole to a failure to automatically overwrite data by default, undermining recent efforts by the messaging service to burnish its privacy credentials by enhancing its encryption procedures to provide additional protection to data in transit.
The disclosures come at a politically sensitive time for WhatsApp which has come under pressure in Brazil to hand over chat logs to prosecutors in an ongoing criminal trial.