29 July 2016, USA :
Yes, If you really think that once you delete your Whatsapp chats, it cannot be recovered? Well, Jonathan Zdziarski has some different idea. Popular third-party chat app WhatsApp is leaving a “forensic trace” of every supposedly deleted chat log, meaning anyone with access to your smartphone or another device connected through the cloud could potentially access data from the app.
Deleting, archiving or clearing your WhatsApp chats does not necessarily mean that they’re getting thoroughly deleted, says forensic scientist and iOS security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski.
Zdziarski said, “To test, I installed the app and started a few different threads. I then archived some, cleared, some, and deleted some threads. I made a second backup after running the ‘Clear All Chats’ function in WhatsApp. None of these deletions or archival options made any difference in how deleted records were preserved. In all cases, the deleted SQLite records remained intact in the database.”
For those using WhatsApp on iPhone, the issue of their data privacy is even more pronounced. Zdziarski said during a backup, WhatsApp‘s chat database gets copied to users’ iCloud backup (on desktop as well) from the iPhone. This then leaves a user’s WhatsApp data open to law enforcement warrants. So next time you delete the chats, remember- They’ll be back!
