In this photo illustration, the WhatsApp application is displayed on a iPhone on April 6, 2016 in San Anselmo, California. Facebook-owned mobile mobile messaging application WhatsApp announced that it has completed end-to-end encryption of of all communic (Photo : Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
It looks like "Clear All Chats" is not really deleting the deleted WhatsApp chats. The latest Whatsapp update is leaving forensic traces of a user's deleted chats.
The popular messaging app, WhatsApp is said to store the deleted chats, noted Jonathan Zdziarski in a blog post. In order to test, he installed the latest version of the app and ran a few threads. He archived some and deleted some threads.
"I made a second backup after running the "Clear All Chats" function in WhatsApp. None of these deletion or archival options made any difference in how deleted records were preserved. In all cases, the deleted SQLite records remained intact in the database," Zdziarski wrote.
He stated that "ephemeral communication is not ephemeral on disk." Apart from WhatsApp, Apple suffered this problem too with iMessage storing SMS.db on iCloud backup and the copies are present on the desktop, iPad or devices a user is receiving the iMessages.
Zdziarski also stated that law enforcement agencies can check a person's device using a warrant with Apple to get access to the deleted Whatsapp chats.
"Anyone with physical access to your computer could copy this data from an existing, unencrypted backup, or potentially decrypt it using password breaking tools, or recover the password from your keychain. If passwords are compelled in your country, you may also be forced to assist law enforcement."
However, according to the post, there is nothing to panic about. It is important to be aware of the footprint of WhatsApp.
As end users of the app, Zdziarski suggested a few tips to mitigate. One can use a long and complex backup password for the phone using iTunes. However, it should not be saved in the keychain as it can be retrieved. Also, one can disable the iCloud backup. And lastly, "periodically, delete the application from your device and reinstall it to flush out the database. This appears to be the only way to flush out deleted records and start fresh."
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