- The FBI managed to recover Signal messages from someone’s phone, even with the app deleted
- There is a setting you can enable to prevent this from being possible
- In other messaging app news, Telegram founder called WhatsApp’s encryption “the biggest consumer fraud in history.”
If you care about privacy, chances are you already use Signal for messaging, and you might have thought that was enough to keep your messages private. But the FBI has just demonstrated that this is not the case.
As reported by 404 Media, the FBI was able to recover Signal messages from someone’s iPhone, even if that person had deleted the app. Since Signal messages are end-to-end encrypted, you would probably assume that the only way someone could read them was to access the sender or recipient’s Signal account, which is not what happened here.
Instead, the FBI was able to access incoming Signal messages through the iPhone’s push notification database, which was still receiving incoming Signal messages despite removing the app. They were unable to access the messages sent by the accused, but they still have access to the other side of the conversations.
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Fortunately, there is a way to prevent this from happening, as Signal has a toggle that prevents content from appearing in notifications. To enable this, open the app and go to Settings > Notifications > Notification Content, then select “No Name or Content” for maximum privacy, or “No Content” if you want the sender’s name to be retrievable.
Of course, this also means that your Signal notifications will stop showing the message content and potentially the sender’s name, which could be annoying, so you should evaluate how much security you think you need.
It’s also worth noting that this vulnerability is likely not exclusive to Signal, so you may want to disable similar settings in other apps where possible.
Is WhatsApp encryption a fraud?
WhatsApp “encryption” is perhaps the biggest consumer fraud in history, fooling billions of users. Despite its claims, it reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties. Telegram has never done this – and never will 🤝 pic.twitter.com/2DYguybgoUApril 9, 2026
And that’s not the only news regarding messaging app security issues today, as Telegram founder Pavel Durov posted on
It’s a troubling claim, but one that WhatsApp has dismissed as “categorically false and absurd.” So, as of now, it’s unclear whether WhatsApp’s encryption is secure or not, but given that it’s been questioned, you might want to consider an alternative like Signal if you’re not already using it.
Telegram itself is another possible alternative, although it has its own security concerns, with, for example, a recently discovered flaw that can expose users’ IP addresses.
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