DELETED WHATSAPP MESSAGES ARE NOT DELETED AS YOU THOUGHT
Look what’s in here:
If you accidentally deleted WhatsApp chat history, messages and attachments on Android phones, like Samsung galaxy phones, LG phones, HTC, Lenovo, Motorola, you can get them back.
According to an iOS researcher, WhatsApp chats have a way of coming back, for deleting them doesn’t wipe them out from the face of the earth.
In a blog post, Zdziarski explains how these chats are preserved in the database, making it easier for a hacker – who has a hold of your phone – to retrieve the original chats and deep-dive into your privacy.
“The WhatsApp chat database gets copied over from the iPhone during a backup, which means it will show up in your iCloud backup and in a desktop backup,” Zdziarski writes.
“Fortunately, desktop backups can be encrypted by enabling the ‘Encrypt Backups’ option in iTunes. Unfortunately, iCloud backups do not honor this encryption, leaving your WhatsApp database subject to law enforcement warrants,” he explains.
If you have any backups of WhatsApp chat history, you will be able to recover chat history from your backups. If you deleted any Chat history or messages without backup, you can still recover lost messages, attachments from the WhatsApp automatic backups. It is because WhatsApp automatically makes backups every day and stores them on your phone’s internal memory (only given that there is enough free space) or external micro SD card of your Android phone.
What you will need in order to recover WhatsApp messages is to uninstall the WhatsApp, then reinstall the chat app again. During the installation process, you will be prompted to restore your message history. Simply tap Restore and everything less than seven days old is restored. While the information can’t necessarily be accessed by a third party, it is still stored locally on your device which means that the only real way to get rid of it is by deleting the app.
Even then, the police can still potentially access it.
Law enforcement can potentially issue a warrant with Apple to obtain your deleted WhatsApp chat logs, which may include deleted messages.
But the one thing that can completely erase your chats from the database is to delete the app in its entirety. Basically, the delete option may not be that great friend after all.
