This time we are finally there: after a longer wait than expected, and despite a first intervention only in appearance, the Meta Team manages once and for all to put an end to the year -old question of the bug that afflicted ephemeral messages on WhatsApp.
The problem, whose users of the famous instant messaging app complained of a long time, was the one that affected the posts for which it was decided to activate the function “View Once”precisely designed to allow the display of a text message, a photo or video only once. The option, introduced in 2021, should have made these contents inaccessible, without giving anyone the opportunity to save them.
Unfortunately for the users of the platform so it was not: in 2023, in fact, the Cybersiczza expert Tal Be’ey had identified a way to evade the protections erected by the WhatsApp team to prevent users from continuing to enjoy these content beyond What should have been the first and only view. The attempt to pick up this flaw made last December, however, did not prove to be decisive as hoped for.
The new vulnerability, which in the latter case proved to be such exclusively for systems equipped with iOS On which WhatsApp was installed, it made the ephemeral content displayable even after opening and closing in the chat. The alarm bell had led the Meta experts to resume the problem in hand, with the aim of solving it once and for all and, apparently, this has happened in the past few days.
But what exactly happened? The protection could be circumvented simply by displaying the ephemeral message and then returning to it through the path “Settings” – “storage and data”, “manage space”. Once this is done, it was therefore sufficient to select the contact of the author of the file, order its content for “more recent” and the game was done: the ephemeral message appeared at the top of the list ready to be viewed again.
Android Police experts have confirmed the impossibility of piercing the protections of the ephemeral files, so it seems that this time the intervention of Meta has been successful.
To arouse perplexity is the silence of Menlo Park’s giant, which usually in such circumstances, especially when he manages to put a piece to important vulnerabilities, issues statements to reassure his users.