Amid all the crisis of data protection across the globe, WhatsApp has launched another feature that increases the brand's liability to store personal user data more securely. However, WhatsApp seems to be banking on their end-to-end encryption for this particular job.
WhatsApp assures that with end-to-end encryption in place the data transferred between two users, who are on the latest versions of WhatsApp, are secured by unique secure code that only the two users can access. This security code is different for different chats. They claim that not even WhatsApp can see these messages.
According to a report by WAbetainfo, a new minor WhatsApp feature has been silently added to updates between 2.18.106 and 2.18.110. What this feature does is that it allows the WhatsApp user to download old media files in a chat even if they delete it from their local storage.
WhatsApp will be saving these media files in their servers for a much longer time. Earlier, the company would let the recipient of the media file to download it within a period of 30 days, after which it was deleted from the company's server and hence couldn't be recovered unless the sender releases it again.
The new update will let the user download the image or video even after it has been downloaded earlier. According to the report, the recipient was able to download media from a text sent 2 months ago but there for the messages dating back to almost a year, the application asks to request the sender to send the file again.
The company has rolled out this new upgrade for Android so far but it is expected to be launched for iOS soon.
The company also released a fix for the timestamp issue with the beta users. The update 2.18.109 brings a fix to a 'day' bug. This bug was altering the time stamp on WhatsApp messages by replacing the first two alphabets with the ASCI codes. For instance, Yesterday became "89ESTERDAY" and Today became "84ODAY". The company has released a fix for the beta users.