The newly introduced feature means that from now on WhatsApp stores our media on their servers even after downloading them
In a minor update, it appears that WhatsApp has added a new feature of re-downloading the deleted media from the WhatsApp folder on the Android phone.
WABetaInfo which first discovered the feature said that they were able to download the deleted media— image, video, GIF, voice message and a document—from the WhatsApp servers even after they were deleted from the phone. The new feature to tweak this has been introduced in WhatsApp's recent updates, between the version 2.18.106 and 2.18.110.
The report claims that they were able to download media which were more than three months old, albeit with a little difficulty. However, with very old media, say August 2017, the feature does not work as the message service suggest to ask the sender to send the media file again.
Earlier, a user could not download the filed if they were deleted from the phone. The un-downloaded media were available for 30 days and after that they would be deleted from the server.
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The newly introduced feature means that from now on WhatsApp stores our media on their servers even after downloading them.
Though, since the media and texts are end-to-end encrypted, even if the data is stored on the server, it cannot be read by anyone.
The feature doesn’t seem to be available for iOS users, probably because the directory where WhatsApp saves media isn’t easily accessible, so this problem does not occur for them, as per the report.