WhatsApp has several features that aim to improve privacy or security. Over time, they have introduced certain new features that may be interesting for this purpose. However, there is always the risk that there may be a vulnerability or something may not work correctly. This is what seems to have happened with the view once feature. We are going to explain what it consists of.
When you send a photo or video, for example, the other person can easily forward it to others. All it takes is for it to reach a couple of groups with a lot of people and something could go viral quickly. To prevent this from happening, there’s the view once feature. Basically, you send a photo and the other person can only open it once and won’t have the option to forward it. However, a bug has caused this feature to not work well.
Problem with WhatsApp’s view once feature
This feature was highly requested by many users and became available a few years ago. One more way to improve privacy. Now, a group of security researchers from Zengo X have reported that Meta introduced this feature with certain flaws, as it allowed someone to easily save and share copies of messages.
They say they quickly reported this to Meta and saw that this issue was already being exploited. They therefore made it public to make users aware of this issue and to protect privacy. Those videos and photos that were sent with a single reading, might not really be the case.
The way this feature works is as follows: the message is sent encrypted and includes a URL to access the WhatsApp server, which is where it will be stored and decrypted so that it can be viewed. These messages can only be opened once. What happens? According to these security researchers, these messages were sent to all of the recipient’s devices, including those that did not have permission to open it. In addition, they indicate that the messages are not immediately deleted from WhatsApp servers.
The messages have the “view once” feature enabled. The problem is that a hypothetical attacker could disable that feature. Basically, bypass that functionality and allow the message to be opened multiple times, forwarded, etc. Just like any other normal message.
Pending solution
WhatsApp security officials have been working to fix this problem in the mobile version. They say a definitive solution is still pending for WhatsApp Web. With this, they hope to prevent a message that should only be opened once from being forwarded or opened multiple times without permission.
There have even been extensions for Chrome that allowed you to bypass this privacy feature of WhatsApp. All of this means that you should be extremely cautious and careful with content that you send through this application and that you think that they will only open it once and that’s it. Preserving privacy is important.
In short, be careful with WhatsApp’s view-once feature, as it has been around for quite some time. Even though they have introduced improvements, there is always the risk that, even if you take a photo of the screen, they can send the content you have swiped over and over again. There are SIM-free messaging apps, alternatives to WhatsApp.
