A new discovery confirms that chats on WhatsApp are not as safe as many believe. Researcher Jonathan Zdziarski found that WhatsApp does not permanently delete messages after a user clicks “delete” on their mobile phone. The messages remain saved, you just need to know how to find them.

This news, published by Zdziarski on his blog , has left many people perplexed. Didn’t WhatsApp say in April that user privacy was totally safe thanks to the introduction of end-to-end encryption ? This system was a guarantee for security for many, but Zdziarski has carried out various tests and shown that WhatsApp does not delete messages permanently.

Even here on MessaggiMania we had talked about it, explaining how with the right method you can both spy and  recover messages deleted by a user.

“ To try – writes the expert – I installed the application and started with a couple of conversations. I archived some messages, deleted others, and deleted some conversations entirely. Then I made a second backup after clicking on ‘Clear all chats’. Neither of these delete or archive options changes the way deleted files are kept. In all cases, the deleted SQLite records remained intact in the database.

WhatsApp deletes the files (or at least tries), but …

Just to be clear, WhatsApp deletes the files (it doesn’t appear to be intentionally trying to preserve the data), but the record itself is not deleted or wiped from the database, leaving a ‘forensic artifact’ that can be recovered and reconstructed in its form. original. “

Zdziarski says that it is not so easy to reconstruct the chats , taking into account that to do this it is necessary to access the device and therefore the iCloud backups, or, alternatively, the backup in iTunes. However, there are some precautions. The researcher recommends encrypting (or encrypting) iCloud and iTunes backups and not storing the password in Apple’s keychain.

Zdziarski also recommends removing the WhatsApp application for iOS periodically , although this only guarantees the deletion of the chats on WhatsApp, but not the backup on iCloud.