- The FBI has managed to retrieve signal messages from someone’s phone, even with the app deleted
- There is a setting you can enable to prevent this from happening
- In other messaging app news, Telegram’s founder has called WhatsApp’s encryption “the biggest consumer scam in history”
If you care about privacy, then there’s a good chance you’re already using Signal for messaging, and you might have assumed this was enough to keep your messages private. But the FBI has just shown that this is not the case.
As reported by 404 Media, the FBI was able to retrieve signal messages from someone’s iPhone even if 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’s or recipient’s Signal account, which is not what happened here.
Instead, the FBI was able to access incoming alerts through the iPhone’s push notification database, which was still receiving incoming alerts despite the app’s removal. They were unable to access messages sent by the defendant, but they 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 a toggle that prevents content from appearing in notifications. To enable this, open the app and go to Settings > Messages > Message Content, then select either ‘No Name or Content’ for maximum privacy or ‘No Content’ if you’re happy for the sender’s name to be retrieved.
Of course, this also means that your signal messages will stop showing message content and potentially the sender’s name as well, which can be inconvenient, so you have to weigh up how much security you think you need.
It’s also worth noting that this vulnerability is likely not exclusive to Signal, so you may want to turn off similar settings in other apps where possible.
Is WhatsApp’s encryption scam?
WhatsApp’s “encryption” may be the biggest consumer scam in history – defrauding billions of users. Despite its claims, it 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 has written on X that “WhatsApp’s ‘encryption’ could be the biggest consumer scam in history,” citing a lawsuit that claims a backdoor allows WhatsApp and Meta employees, along with third parties, to “bypass encryption to see users’ privates.”
It’s a troubling claim, but one that WhatsApp has denied, calling it “categorically false and absurd.” So for now it’s unclear whether WhatsApp’s encryption is secure or not, but given that it’s been called into question, 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, with a bug recently being found that could expose users’ IP addresses, for example.
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