• The FBI has managed to retrieve Signal messages from someone's phone, even with the app deleted
• There's a setting you can enable to prevent this from being possible
• In other messaging app news, Telegram's founder has called WhatsApp's encryption "the biggest consumer fraud in history"

If you care about privacy, then there’s a good chance you already use Signal for messaging, and you might have assumed that this was enough to keep your messages private. But the FBI has just shown that’s not the case.

As reported by 404 Media, the FBI was able to retrieve Signal messages from someone’s iPhone, even though the person had deleted the app. Given that Signal messages have end-to-end encryption, you’d probably assume that the only way someone could read them was with access to the sender or recipient’s Signal account, which isn’t what happened here.

Instead, the FBI was able to access incoming Signal messages via the iPhone’s push notification database, which still received incoming Signal messages despite the app’s removal. They weren’t able to access messages sent by the defendant, but they still had access to the other side of conversations.

Article continues below

Fortunately, there is a way to prevent this from happening, as Signal has a toggle that stops content from appearing in notifications. To enable this, open the app and head to Settings > Notifications > Notification Content, and then select either ‘No Name or Content’ for maximum privacy, or ‘No Content’ if you’re happy for the sender’s name to be retrievable.

Of course, this also means your Signal notifications will cease to show message content and potentially the sender’s name too, which could be inconvenient, so you’ve got to weigh up how much security you think you need.

It’s also worth noting that this vulnerability presumably isn’t exclusive to Signal, so you might want to turn off similar settings in other apps where possible.

Is WhatsApp's encryption a fraud?

And this isn’t the only news about security issues with messaging apps today, as Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov has posted on X that “WhatsApp’s ‘encryption’ may be the biggest consumer fraud in history,” citing a lawsuit that claims a backdoor allows WhatsApp and Meta employees along with third-parties to “circumvent encryption in order to view users’ private messages.”

It’s a troubling claim, but it’s one that WhatsApp has rejected, calling it “categorically false and absurd.” So, for now, it’s unclear whether WhatsApp’s encryption is secure or not, but given that it has been called into question, you might want to consider an alternative such as Signal if you’re not already using that.

Telegram itself is another possible alternative, though that’s had its own security issues, with, for example, a flaw recently being found that can expose user IP addresses.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.