The feature allowing users to delete messages that they accidently sent to all recipients was included in the popular messenger app a long time ago, easing the lives of many users; but another WhatsApp feature has apparently come in conflict with it, essentially rendering it useless.

A new simple method that allows users to read deleted messages in WhatsApp has recently been revealed. It turns out that by simply reinstalling the application, some users are able to read messages that were sent to them, but were later deleted by the author for both themselves and the recipient.

The method only works for those who have enabled the message backup feature. When WhatsApp is reinstalled, it restores all the messages from the backup including those that had been marked as deleted by the sender.

In fact, these messages were never actually removed from the users' phones, but just hidden by the caption "this message was deleted". After being restored from the backup file, the messages lose their "deleted" marking and are thus no longer hidden from the user.

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This new method is much easier and safer than one that was discovered back in 2017. That method suggested using third-party applications to recover the history of smartphone notifications. Since the deleted messages initially popped up in the notification, their text would have been stored in the phone's history. However, the apps that were used to access the history could potentially contain viruses or spyware, rendering them unsafe for the user's privacy.

Earlier, a privacy issue surfaced in the popular iOS app, FaceTime, allowing ordinary users to tap into each other's iPhones. The bug allowed the FaceTime caller to hear what was happening on the other end, prior to the receiver of the call picking up the phone. Apple temporarily disabled FaceTime's conference call feature, which had been used to activate the bug and promised to fix it in the next security patch.