- The FBI has managed to recover Signal messages from someone’s phone, even with the app removed
- There is a setting you can enable to prevent this from being possible.
- In other messaging app news, Telegram’s founder called WhatsApp encryption “the biggest consumer fraud in history.”
If you care about privacy, there’s a good chance you already use Signal to send messages and assumed this was enough to keep your messages private. But the FBI just proved that’s not the case.
As reported by 404 Media, the FBI was able to recover Signal messages from someone’s iPhone, even though the person had deleted the app. Since Signal messages have end-to-end encryption, you would probably assume that the only way someone could read them was by accessing 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 the app’s removal. They were unable to access the messages sent by the accused, but still had 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 an option that prevents content from appearing in notifications. To enable this, open the app and head to Settings > Notifications > Notification Content, and then select ‘No Name or Content’ for maximum privacy, or ‘No Content’ if you want the sender name to be able to be retrieved.
Of course, this also means that your Signal notifications will stop showing the content of the message and potentially the sender’s name as well, which could be a drawback, so you need to weigh up how much security you think you need.
It’s also worth noting that this vulnerability is probably not unique to Signal, so you may want to disable similar settings in other apps where possible.
Is WhatsApp encryption a fraud?
WhatsApp “encryption” may be the biggest consumer fraud in history: deceiving billions of users. Despite his claims, he reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties. Telegram has never done this and never will 🤝 pic.twitter.com/2DYguybgoUApril 9, 2026
And this isn’t the only news about security issues with messaging apps today, as Telegram founder Pavel Durov posted on
It’s a worrying claim, but WhatsApp has rejected it, calling it “categorically false and absurd.” So for now, it’s unclear whether WhatsApp encryption is secure or not, but since 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 had its own security problems; For example, a flaw was recently found that can expose users’ IP addresses.
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