Quote:An issue in instant messaging application WhatsApp may provide others with full access to your conversations when replacing phone numbers.

Amazon employee Abby Fuller has reported a potential bug that gained a lot of exposure online lately: when setting up WhatsApp on a new device using a new phone number, the full message archive of the previous owner was restored on the phone.

“Yes it was a new device. No it wasn't second hand. It was not a second hand SIM. Yes I'm sure they weren't my messages, or groups that I was added to. Yes they were in plaintext. I am sure it's my phone number. It was not restored from a backup,” she explained in a follow-up tweet.

Other users who joined the conversation confirmed this happened on their devices as well, also when setting up WhatsApp with a new phone number.

According to WhatsApp’s own support documents, the message history associated with a specific phone number is completely removed after 45 days of inactivity.

But as Abby Fuller explains on Twitter, this isn’t the case here, as she owned the phone number for more than 45 days, so the message history wasn’t supposed to be there anymore.