WhatsApp ‘Delete for Everyone’ Doesn’t Delete Media Files Sent to iPhone Users

Sep 16, 2019

Mistakenly sent a picture to someone via WhatsApp that you
shouldn’t have?

Well, we’ve all been there, but what’s more unfortunate is that
the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature WhatsApp introduced two years ago
contains an unpatched privacy bug, leaving its users with false
sense of privacy.

WhatsApp and its rival Telegram messenger offer “Delete for
Everyone,” a potentially life-saving feature on which millions of
people today rely to escape the awkwardness of sending
messages/pictures/videos to the wrong person.

As the name indicates, the ‘Delete for Everyone‘ feature
has been intended to unsend mistakenly sent inappropriate
messages—including photos and videos—from the recipient’s phone, or
all members of a group.

In the case of WhatsApp, the feature is only available within 1
hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds of sending a message you want to
delete.

However, it turns out that WhatsApp ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature
doesn’t delete media files sent to iPhone users (with default
settings) as it does from the Android devices, leaving them saved
on the recipient’s iOS device even if the messenger chat screen
displays you, “This message has been deleted.”

According to Shitesh Sachan ^[1], an application security
consultant, who found this privacy issue and shared his findings
exclusively with The Hacker News, the feature for WhatsApp for iOS
has not been designed to delete received media files saved in the
iPhone’s Camera Roll.

On the other hand, if you use ‘Delete for Everyone’ against an
Android user, WhatsApp will delete the sent media files from the
recipient device’s gallery as well.

#Telegram messenger patches a #privacy flaw in its “delete for everyone”
feature that was not actually deleting shared images from the
recipients’ devices stored under “/Telegram/Telegram
Images/” folder; instead was only deleting it from the chat
screen.https://t.co/JNgfUsNYYL ^[2]^[3]^[4]

— The Hacker News (@TheHackersNews) September 9, 2019 ^[5]

It concerns because WhatsApp
by default ^[6] automatically saves all
images/videos you receive via WhatsApp to your iPhone’s Camera Roll
or Android’s Media Gallery, which otherwise can be turned OFF from
the app’s settings, but very few people care about it.

Earlier this week, a similar privacy flaw was disclosed in the
“Delete for Everyone” feature of the Telegram messenger, which the company
patched immediately to keep the feature useful in situations for
which it has primarily been designed.
^[7]

However, when Sachan reported this issue to WhatsApp, the company
refused to address the issue, saying:

“The functionality provided via “Delete for Everyone” is intended
to delete the message and there is no guarantee that the media (or
message) will be permanently deleted—the implementation focuses
around the message presence in WhatsApp.”

WhatsApp Security team also argued that the “recipients may see
your message before it’s deleted or if deletion wasn’t successful,”
but the feature was not even designed to save you from
out-of-the-hand scenarios where recipients move or save the media
file manually or screenshot the chat.

Though WhatsApp said “there is no guarantee a message or the
attachments will be deleted,” the company said it might make
changes to this functionality and its implementation in the
future.

References

^{^}
Shitesh Sachan
(twitter.com)
^{^}
#Telegram
(twitter.com)
^{^}
#privacy
(twitter.com)
^{^}
https://t.co/JNgfUsNYYL
(t.co)
^{^}
September 9, 2019
(twitter.com)
^{^}
WhatsApp by default
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Telegram
messenger (www.inputzero.io)

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WhatsApp ‘Delete for Everyone’ Doesn’t Delete Media Files Sent to iPhone Users

References

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