Crime

Hackers expose what Whatsapp is doing with your most embarrassing pictures you delete

Published

9 years ago

April 17, 2018

Whatsapp is quietly storing deleted images some people would rather see consigned to the virtual dustbin of history, it’s been claimed.

Experts have suggested that a new update for Android is playing havoc with a system which usually deletes images forever after you have received them.

The website WaBetaInfo said it was able to download images which had been deleted two or even three months ago.

Normally Whatsapp stores the images you receive for 30 days so they can be downloaded. It then deletes the images after this time.

However, WaBetaInfo said it was able to download images up to three months after they should have been deleted.

It wrote: ‘WhatsApp allows to download deleted media from their servers again. This automatically translates in the fact that WhatsApp continues to store our media on their servers also after downloading them.

‘This feature was partially available before: non-downloaded media were available for 30 days and, when the recipient downloaded the media, WhatsApp immediately deleted it from the server.’

However, there’s probably nothing to be worried about because the images are encrypted, which means they cannot be easily seen by creepers’ peepers.

Researchers recently claimed creepy hackers could use the wildly popular app to snoop on people’s private group conversations.

Vivek Wadhwa, distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Engineering in Silicon Valley, claimed any ‘tech-savvy person can obtain treasure troves of data from WhatsApp groups by using nothing more than an old Samsung smartphone running scripts and off-the-shelf applications’.

Mirror