WhatsApp For iPhone Warning: Don’t Use View Once Feature Without Updating

WhatsApp’s many features include View Once, so if you had an image or video that you wanted to share, but didn’t want hanging around, it would vanish after a single view. Only it turns out it wasn’t working quite as it should. Now, it seems it’s been fixed—but only with the latest update.

The vulnerability became apparent after researcher Ramshath wrote about it on Sunday, Jan. 25. “I discovered a way to bypass the ‘View Once’ feature. This bypass allowed me to access the image even after it was meant to vanish into thin air,” they said.

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Ramshath reported this to WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, which said they were already aware and working on a solution. Now, an update has been issued to fix this.

The problem in the feature only affected iPhone users, not Android. View Once is designed so that users can send media safe in the knowledge that once opened it’s difficult for people to save it. Such photos and videos can’t be copied via a screenshot, for instance. Though, as WhatsApp points out, “There are other ways your view once media or voice message can be saved. For example, recipients can take a photo or video of your view once media with a camera or other device before it disappears.”

However, the researcher found that if, after opening a View Once file, you went to the app’s settings and chose Storage and Data and then Manage Storage, they found the image was still accessible.

That doesn’t sound like something that you could only view once, then. It’s not the first time View Once has had problems, as Tim Hardwick points out at MacRumors.

So, how do you protect yourself against this problem? Well, obviously you can avoid the View Once feature, but WhatsApp issued an update for iPhone users on Wednesday, Jan. 29, version 25.2.3.

To check you’re up to date, go to the App Store, type WhatsApp Messenger into the search bar, tap the WhatsApp icon and choose update. If instead it says Open, then you are up to date and further down the page, under What’s New it will give the version number.

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