All WhatsApp users are being urged to stay alert when sending a certain type of chat after security experts discovered a concerning flaw with the popular messaging service. The bug affects so-called “view once” chats which are meant to do exactly what they say on the tin and disappear after being seen by the recipient.
“Once you send a view once photo, video, or voice message, you won’t be able to view it again,” WhatsApp explains on its blog pages.
“Any photos or videos you send won’t be saved to the recipient’s Photos or Gallery.”
This option is meant to offer a way of sending messages that don’t stick around once being read and they are also meant to offer a much more secret and secure way of chatting with WhatsApp confirming that the “recipient also can’t take a screenshot of anything you send using view once.”.
However, the worrying bug found by the team at Zengo X Research Team appears to allow people to screenshot “View Once” messages if they happen to use WhatsApp on the web. For those unaware, WhatsApp allows users to check their chats via a browser and it’s this feature that is causing the problems.
“As part of our ongoing security research we have identified a critical privacy flaw in Meta’s WhatsApp, the world’s most popular Instant Messaging (IM) app,” explained Tal Be’ery from Zengo X.
“The Zengo X Research Team has discovered that WhatsApp’s View Once media feature, intended for increased privacy, is completely broken and can be trivially bypassed.
“The only thing that is worse than no privacy, is a false sense of privacy in which users are led to believe some forms of communication are private when in fact they are not. Currently, WhatsApp’s View once is a blunt form of false privacy and should either be thoroughly fixed or abandoned.”
WhatsApp has now been made aware of the flaw and is in the process of rolling out a fix which should prevent screenshots from being taken no matter how or where you access WhatsApp.
However, if you are thinking of using “view once” you should still be careful and only send messages to people you really trust.
In a statement sent to TechCrunch, WhatsApp said: “We are already in the process of rolling out updates to view once on web. We continue to encourage users to only send view once messages to people they know and trust.”
